In an announcement last week, CBP said more than 900 individual importations containing more than 4 million dozens of apparel were falsely declared as products of other countries, but were actually Chinese.
CBP said it had charged the merchandise to U.S.-China agreed upon quota levels.
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Commissioner Ralph Basham said his agency is “committed to strongly enforcing our trade agreements,” and “we will continue to work with members of the trade community and other federal agencies to pursue importers who make false declarations in order to circumvent import quotas.”
The U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel (USA-ITA), a trade organization for the apparel industry, said the move was “politically motivated” and “irrelevant to current business.”
“This is politics. Pure and simple. With the quotas set to end in less than six months, CBP has to justify the resources it has dedicated to rummaging through foreign factories and then detaining and seizing apparel shipments since 2006,” said Laura E. Jones, executive director of USA-ITA. “We certainly don’t condone any illegal activity, but the real answer is to finally end the quota system, not justify the wasted government resources spent checking whether factories keep massive quantities of perfect paper records.”
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Jones said that as a result of the charges against 10 quota levels, “some quotas will show higher ‘fill rates,’ but the adjustments do not result in any quota levels being overfilled.” And she added, “the total value of the charges is $80 million, an extremely small sum given that total U.S. apparel imports during those two years was $145 billion.
“What we don’t know is how much of this is about sloppy paperwork by foreign factories and how much is the result of smuggling or misrepresentation of origin. But either way, we do know that CBP is under pressure from the U.S. textile industry to prove that it is protecting them,” Jones said. “The numbers involved, though, are insignificant. Legitimate trade, which is the bulk of business, will be unaffected.”
“I am pleased that CBP has taken strong measures to detect and cease illegal textile transshipments,” said Matt Priest, chairman of the Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements, an interagency group chaired by the Commerce Department that is responsible for matters affecting textile trade policy and for supervising the implementation of all textile trade agreements.
“We applaud CBP’s efforts, and those of our trading partners, in working to ensure the integrity of our agreement with China. Customs enforcement measures, such as the action taken today by CBP, are a vital component of our trade policy regime” said Scott Quesenberry, Special Textile Negotiator for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
