OPINION:
While Congress debates border solutions, American manufacturers quietly revolutionize our industrial strategy. By moving critical supply chains from Asia to Central America, U.S. companies are simultaneously strengthening our manufacturing base, reducing China’s leverage over our economy and creating regional stability through job creation.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s happening now.
Our Business & Investment Council has already mobilized $5 billion in private sector investments across Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to integrate these allies into the U.S. manufacturing supply chain.
Early results prove the concept: When a North Carolina textile manufacturer recently established operations in El Salvador, it didn’t just create jobs there — it generated new technical and management positions in North Carolina while securing its supply chain with reliable partners just days rather than months away by ship.
The strategic advantages for U.S. manufacturing are compelling. Components that once traveled 8,000 miles from Chinese factories now move through secure shipping lanes from ports less than a week from U.S. sites. American manufacturers maintain direct oversight of production, quality control and intellectual property.
Most importantly, every manufacturing job relocated from Asia to Central America creates an estimated 1.2 new jobs in American logistics, engineering and advanced manufacturing.
The numbers tell a story of transformation. Current investments will create 150,000 new jobs in the region, expanding to 500,000 direct jobs by 2025. In Honduras, U.S. automotive suppliers are building component factories previously dependent on Chinese production. In Guatemala, American manufacturers are establishing semiconductor packaging centers that strengthen our tech supply chain security. Each project reduces our strategic vulnerabilities while building industrial capacity under U.S. influence rather than Chinese control.
This manufacturing integration delivers an added benefit: economic stability that reduces migration pressure. When people have good jobs at home, they build their futures there. But make no mistake — this is fundamentally about American industrial competitiveness in an era of strategic competition with China.
Bureaucratic inertia, however, threatens this transformation. The U.S. Development Finance Corp., known as the DFC, which is designed to support such investments, moves too slowly through outdated processes. Meanwhile, China is actively seeking to establish its own manufacturing presence in our hemisphere. Three policy changes would accelerate America’s industrial resurgence:
1. Create a Strategic Manufacturing Initiative at the DFC with fast-track approval for nearshoring projects that strengthen U.S. supply chains and reduce Chinese leverage.
2. Pass legislation designating Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as priority manufacturing partners, with streamlined processes for industrial cooperation and trade integration.
3. Establish a joint Commerce-State-Treasury office specifically tasked with facilitating rapid industrial integration with Central American partners.
The private sector is ready to invest $10 billion by 2025 in this manufacturing transformation. The question isn’t whether supply chains will relocate from China; it’s whether the United States will seize this moment to rebuild our industrial strength with trusted partners in our own hemisphere.
When we look back a decade from now, we’ll see this moment as a strategic choice: We either acted decisively to secure the United States’ manufacturing future through partnership with our closest neighbors or watched as our industrial capacity remained vulnerable to foreign pressure. The private sector has shown the way forward. Now we need Washington to move with the urgency this opportunity demands.
• Juan J. Daboub leads the HUGE Business and Investment Council, a private sector initiative driving strategic manufacturing integration across the United States, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Learn more at www.think-huge.org.
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