I may be misinformed on the facts, so please correct me if I am wrong, okay?
What precisely is the issue with jobs?
If being located in America means opening up jobs for America, the person making the argument presupposes that a substantial number of American workers are not able to find jobs. I have yet to encounter data, statistics, news reports, or op eds claiming such. Rather, I have seen the opposite, companies failing to find employees. (well, duh, a "failure to find employees" is nothing more than a "failure to find employees at XYZ wage and working conditions")
Plus, through the consequences of tariffs, any gains that workers could get from new jobs are likely to be erased by the higher prices that the tariffs cause. A tariff is a net loss to the country that implements it. Tariffs reduce the American level of wages.
To quote Henry Hazlitt:
There is here no net gain to industry as a whole. But as a result of the artificial barrier erected against foreign goods, American labor, capital and land are deflected from what they can do more efficiently to what they do less efficiently. Therefore, as a result of the tariff wall, the average productivity of American labor and capital is reduced. If we look at it now from the consumer’s point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced. Whether the net effect of the tariff is to lower money wages or to raise money prices will depend upon the monetary policies that are followed. But what is clear is that the tariff—though it may increase wages above what they would have been in the protected industries— must on net balance, when all occupations are considered, reduce real wages.
Only minds corrupted by generations of misleading propaganda can regard this conclusion as paradoxical. What other result could we expect from a policy of deliberately using our resources of capital and manpower in less efficient ways than we know how to use them? What other result could we expect from deliberately erecting artificial obstacles to trade and transportation?
For the erection of tariff walls has the same effect as the erection of real walls. It is significant that the protectionists habitually use the language of warfare. They talk of ‘repelling an invasion’ of foreign products. And the means they suggest in the fiscal field are like those of the battlefield. The tariff barriers that are put up to repel this invasion are like the tank traps, trenches, and barbed-wire entanglements created to repel or slow down attempted invasion by a foreign army.
