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Posted: 2017-01-31T12:34:18Z | Updated: 2017-01-31T17:11:28Z

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump has made Mexico the central focus of his push to reform U.S. trade policy, singling out the neighboring nation Thursday with a proposed 20 percent import tax that the White House subsequently walked back.

If Trump is truly committed to saving American jobs lost to unfair trade practices, though, reshaping trade with China should be the priority, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

The report, authored by EPI senior economist Robert Scott, estimates that Chinas admission into the World Trade Organization, which vastly expanded U.S.-China trade, cost the U.S. 3.4 million jobs from 2001 to 2015. Three-quarters of the losses 2.6 million jobs were in manufacturing, according to Scotts analysis.

We need to be targeting the countries that generate the vast majority of our trade surplus: China, Japan and Germany, Scott told The Huffington Post.

Mexico is not engaging in unfair trade, he added. We are an integrated North American economy, and Mexico helps us compete against China. So to the extent we discriminate against them, it is going to hurt, not help.

To come up with his figures, Scott first calculated the net U.S. goods trade deficit with China by industry, subtracting the value of American exports to China from Chinese imports to the U.S. over the period he examined. Using official data, he then estimated how many jobs it would take for those industries to generate the equivalent of that amount if the those goods were produced domestically instead.

Within manufacturing, Scott found that trade with China displaced over 1.2 million computer and electronic parts-making jobs, 204,900 apparel jobs and 57,100 jobs in the steel and aluminum industries, among other affected sectors.

Workers directly affected by trade with China typically must settle for lower-paying jobs. Displaced workers lost a total of $37 billion in wages in 2011 alone, according to a 2013 analysis by Scott that he cited in Tuesdays paper. And that figure likely understates the impact, since the threat of offshoring to China also diminished the bargaining power of workers whose jobs remained in the United States.

Scotts findings are consistent with those of other studies. An August 2014 paper by MIT economists estimating that trade with China cost the U.S. 2 million to 2.4 million jobs from 1999 to 2011.

A feature that makes Scotts study stand out, though, is his inclusion of interactive digital maps showing the effect of the job displacement on every state and congressional district. The states hardest hit by these losses as a percentage of total state employment may come as a surprise. Oregon, California, New Hampshire, Minnesota and North Carolina lead the pack.

The three most affected congressional districts are in California. The fourth-most affected district is in Texas and the fifth is in Oregon.

Scott acknowledged that if trade with China had not opened up, some companies would have introduced automation or otherwise modernized their factories in ways that reduced employment anyway.

But he insisted that without the goods trade deficit there would nonetheless be millions more domestic jobs than there are now.

There has been productivity growth in manufacturing for generations, he noted, which is often the result of technological upgrades. But those changes did not result in such precipitous employment drops until recently, he said.

Scotts paper is not an argument against trade with China or any other country however. He instead points to myriad ways that China games the international trade system to give an unfair advantage to its products, and Scott calls for taking a tougher stance on its tactics.

The accusations are by now familiar. China subsidizes its manufacturing exports, allowing its companies to dump goods overseas, or sell them at below-market prices. Its system of subsidies also encourages Chinese firms to maintain excess production capacity that in turn creates an incentive to dump goods.

And Chinas longstanding policy of stockpiling U.S. Treasury bills and other foreign assets to devalue its currency has allowed its companies to suck up massive market share, Scott argued.

Many economists claim that China has stopped artificially devaluing or manipulating its currency in recent years. But Scott and others, including Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, maintain that the Chinese central banks massive reserves of foreign assets, including U.S. bonds, continue to depress its currency.