If you put up a barrier, people will find a way around it. So its not shocking to read recent news stories about how some businesses are trying to skirt around tariffs – particularly from China.
They’re shipping goods through third countries, rather than directly from China, using special “shoppers” to skirt minimum quantity amounts, colluding with suppliers to falsify country-of-origin labels, undervaluing goods, or “assembling” products out of China where tariffs are lower. They’re creating shell companies in more tariff-friendly countries and even going so far as forging certificates of origin (thanks ChatGPT!) and otherwise falsifying shipping documentation in collusion with, or independently from, their suppliers.
