I would take issue with that (and I think I would be joined by a large consensus of economic thinkers regardless of political persuasion), because favouring protectionism is something that is harmful to domestic and foreign citizens alike, thus the protectionist acts as if they don't care about their fellow nationals (whose income they lower by pushing retail prices higher) and care still less for foreigners (whose income they lower by cutting demand for their labour).
Not a bit of it. We will still need lychees and durien and jack fruit and bamboo shoots and some of us actually like the style of Asian cook ware when we are cooking Asian style food.
I like Kikomon soy sauce for most applications, and the Japanese have done us the favor of opening a few facilities to make it here, using local soy beans. Win/win situation, right? They make better soy sauce than we can, and they are buying our farm produce to make it, directly benefitting our farmers, making up for the fact that our sorry soy sauce manufactures can't compete. There is still money flowing both ways, so those displaced American soy sauce workers can still find a job making ketchup or beer. As for the investors in thew losing American soy sauce company, the drongos should have invested in a vinegar brewery.
Toyota is quite another matter, though.
We make cars too, and we used to make really good ones, using local materials. (The auto manufacturers located in Detroit because there were some steel mills handy to the purpose. Ford had even considered making cars with plastic bodies based on soybeans, which are also rather easy to obtain in that part of the country.) We used to export quite a few cars.
So here comes Toyota, making cars here to be sold here, using mostly Japanese-made parts. The cars that they make are not going back to Japan for Japanese consumers, but the money is going back to Japan, mostly to Japanese investors. Sure, a few more American workers have jobs in Georgia or whatever impoverished state subsidized the Japanese to come in there, but it is at a loss of jobs in Detroit, and less of the money made by the company goes into the American ecconomy (or treasury.)
Now, assume for a moment that Americans have developed a way of preserving durien and developed a taste for it. If the inventors of the preserving method have a lick of sense, they are going to build their processing plant in Vietnam. A few Americans are going to make a living wage manufacturing the parts for the durien processing machinery and hauling it off to Vietnam. Now the Vietnamese farmers have a bigger market for their durien, a few more Vietnamese industrial workers have good jobs processing that durien. The farmers and packers have more money to spend buying the goods and services of their neighbors, and maybe a few of them can afford to buy American CDs, maybe even a Chevy.
That's how it is supposed to work.
Mostly, it doesn't, because there are more Japanese outfits working here on the Toyota model than on the Kikomon model.
And, instead of locating in Vietnam to pack trpical fruits that we cannot grow here, our companies are going there to make things that we used to make here. That just bleeds jobs out of this country and shifts the national wealth into fewer hands at the top of the food chain.
The protectionist is an inherently immoral character IMO who seeks to enrich a small minority of protected but unproductive folks at the expense of everyone else.
Friedmanite "free trade" benefits unproductive people at the top of the food chain. You are blaming the American worker for the sins of the executives.
