While the American business community is broadly bullish on a second Trump administration, many businesses in Washington state want to see the fine print on the president-elect’s economic policies.
Anxieties are especially high in industries that rely on international markets, such as agriculture and tech, which are vulnerable if Trump follows through on campaign promises around trade and immigration.
Across rural Washington, many farmers wonder whether Trump’s vow to raise tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere will reprise the trade war that started after Trump imposed tariffs in his first term.
In the Seattle-area tech industry, meanwhile, enthusiasm over Trump’s promises to cut taxes and regulations is tempered by worries that his anti-immigrant stance could chill an industry that relies heavily on foreign-born talent.
“Does this affect how we innovate? Does this affect how we bring in talent?” said Seattle entrepreneur Priyanka Kulkarni, whose Seattle startup, Casium, helps expedite business-related immigration, and which saw a surge in inquiries from nervous employers and workers in the run-up to the election.
Such nervousness is understandable, given what’s at stake.
On trade restrictions, for example, Trump has promised tariffs of 60% on Chinese imports and 20% on all other imports. If enacted, that would make imported goods dramatically more expensive and would almost certainly lead China and other nations to retaliate with stiff tariffs on U.S. goods.
Predicting Trump’s actual policies, however, is especially challenging, experts say, given the president-elect’s penchant for extreme rhetoric.
On trade, for example, it’s not clear whether Trump’s actual tariffs will match his election promises or whether his advisers will persuade him to back tariffs that are lower or more narrowly targeted.
Lessons from Trump’s first term
Still, many business are treading cautiously, given the impacts of Trump’s economic policies during his first term.
When Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese steel in 2018, for example, the Chinese retaliated with tariffs on U.S. farm products, including many that are key to the Washington farm economy, such as cherries and apples.
State cherry growers alone lost an estimated $60 million to $80 million in forgone profits due to the tariffs, according to a 2018 estimate by Frank Davis, an executive with Washington Fruit and Produce in Yakima.
After Trump raised tariffs on imports from India, also in 2018, India’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products hit Washington’s apple business hard, recalled Bryan Gonzalez, with Seattle-based agricultural export firm F.C. Bloxom.
Although the Biden administration eventually reached a new arrangement with India last year, apple shipments to Indian buyers “have only just started coming back,” Gonzalez said.
Employers, too, can draw on lessons from Trump’s approach to immigration policies in his first term, said Tahmina Watson, a Seattle immigration attorney who works with employers and foreign workers.
Under Trump’s 2017 “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, for example, the federal government intensified its scrutiny of applications for H-1B visas that allow skilled foreigners to work for American companies. The rate of application denials jumped to 24%, compared with around 6% in 2015, according to federal data compiled by the American Immigration Council.
Although the Biden administration reversed some of those changes, many employers fear renewed restrictions on foreign workers under a second Trump administration, Watson said.
That could pose challenges for Big Tech firms like Amazon and Microsoft, which together have accounted for more than 40,000 H-1B visa applications since 2021, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Despite a recent wave of tech layoffs, the sector is still struggling to find enough homegrown job applicants to work on an increasingly complicated suite of technologies such as artificial intelligence.
But more restrictive hiring regulations could be even more burdensome for smaller tech firms, which also heavily rely on foreign-born labor to fill their ranks.
“The expectation is that it’s (going to be) harder to hire now,” said Jerry Lopez, founder of a 50-person tech firm called NoiseFigure Research in Renton, who says foreign applicants have outnumbered American citizens by 4 or 5 to 1.
Lopez worries that if Trump again restricts hiring of foreign workers, the competition for talent in the tech sector will heat back up and put smaller firms at a disadvantage against the deep-pocketed tech giants, much as happened during COVID-19. “It’s about to start again.”
Hedging their Trump bets
Some businesses are optimistic that Trump’s economic policies will be tempered in a second term by what some see as a more business-friendly stance and by his closer ties to business figures.
They note that Elon Musk, the tech mogul who heavily supported the Trump campaign, is an immigrant who also relies on foreign workers at his own ventures, including Tesla.
“It’s not going to be lost on Elon Musk that if you eliminate the access to (global) technical capability in the U.S., you’re essentially eliminating its ability to compete,” said Kaj Pedersen, chief technology officer at AstrumU, a Kirkland-based artificial intelligence firm with many foreign-born staffers.
Despite such hopes, many businesses are trying to buffer themselves from the risk that Trump’s policies more closely mirror his campaign rhetoric.
For months now, shipping industry officials said, many retailers that rely on imported goods have been putting in extra orders as a hedge against potential tariffs, according to shipping industry officials. That’s because import tariffs are paid by the importers, who either must absorb those extra costs or pass them along their customers.
One shipping industry official said that If Trump continues to signal higher tariffs, this “forward buying” will continue “as we roll into January, February (and) March.”
On the immigration side, experts like Watson, the attorney, are urging employers and workers to file their applications for new or upgraded work visas as soon as possible, rather than waiting to see what the new administration’s policies look like. “What (the Trump administration) may do from January onwards is a complete unknown.”
Limited options
For many businesses and workers in globally sensitive fields, however, options may be limited.
Lopez, the Renton tech founder, said his strategy under a Trump second term may largely consist of freezing external hires and reining in plans to expand his business. “We’ll have to hunker down,” he said.
Options are also few for many Washington exporters. Farmers and orchardists, for example, can’t speed up production to outrun a possible trade war. Perishable crops like cherries have a narrow window for export. Even producers of storable crops, such as wheat, can ill afford to wait out a trade war.
“If you’re not selling that product, the farmers are losing cash flow,” said Casey Chumrau, CEO at the Washington State Grain Commission.
Still, many export-dependent businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach.
Mark Anderson, an Ellensburg hay exporter, thinks the short-term pain from a trade war could be worth it if tariffs persuade foreign countries to open up their markets to more American products.
“I feel like I’m saying the same thing I said when Trump was president last time,” said Anderson, who is one of the largest hay exporters on the West Coast. “Yeah, these tariffs aren’t great, but if, on the other side of it, we have healthier markets, it would be good.”
And in the scheme of things, Anderson said, tariffs are just one of a multitude of risks farmers face.
As pressing, he said, are rising costs of inputs such as fuel, higher interest rates and increased labor costs from the state’s new overtime regulations, not to mention sagging demand in places like South Korea, where the dairy farmers that buy American hay are still not fully recovered from COVID.
“These markets have been really struggling to find balance in the post-COVID era,” he said.
Chumrau, with the state grain commission, agrees.
Washington’s grain producers are “accustomed to a lot of risk … and have been already dealing with a lot of uncertainty,” she said. “Tariffs aren’t something that we are really focused on right now.”
