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Buy American campaigns operate on the assumption that if you buy a product made in the United States, then the company making the profit off that sale is going to reinvest in good union jobs in the United States — but that is very rarely the case. The companies didn’t agree to that partnership. They have instead used those profits to lobby for free-trade agreements that grease the skids for them to go overseas.

People who might think they can separate out some sort of progressive version of Buy American will ultimately be unable to escape it sliding into “Hire American” or “America First,” and the notion that the United States shouldn’t be concerned with the struggles of working people in other countries.

Trump’s formulation goes from Buy American to “Hire American,” which very clearly calls for discrimination against immigrants, including authorized immigrants. He’s fanning the flames of racism here. There’s a reason why Trump and probably Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller put that right up top in his inaugural. They know what they are doing. They want to split native-born working people away from immigrant workers.

I find it tragic that the US labor movement would follow Trump into his trap. It’s only a month later and already some labor leaders are saying, “Yes, let’s build the Keystone XL pipeline using union products made in the United States.” And then of course Trump exempted the Keystone pipeline from his own Buy American pledge.

Elite support for Buy American campaigns has almost always contained that kind of hypocrisy. Trump isn’t himself buying American. But he or his advisers are smart. They are using the “Buy American, Hire American” call to drive a wedge between American working people and working people in the rest of the world — and a lot of people are falling for it.