china doesn't have some great competitive advantage over america, it's simply able to produce things cheaper by not paying it's workers. other countries in the pacific rim are worse, and africa is up next.

the united states has a unionized workforce and high living standards. it cannot compete with low wage chinese workers. it consequently imports things instead of making them, and the economy has reoriented to adjust for that.

if you actually listen to what the republicans are saying, their concern is not about profit maximization, as it has been since this system was set up under reagan and expanded under clinton. this isn't about money. rather, trump is concerned about the national security implications of offshoring everything and wants to force production back to the united states to eliminate the reliance on foreign manufacturers.

in order to do that, america needs to find some way to manufacture goods using labour that is at least competitive with asian labour in cost inputs, which to this point has been an intractable problem to address without abandoning some foundational principle of american society, like unionization. mechanization is an incomplete solution. china's labour conditions are slowly improving, but they're just offshoring to other countries, like vietnam. america doesn't have an infinite amount of time to wait; the issue is national security.

getting labour costs in america down far enough that they can compete with asian labour costs can only be done via the 13th amendment. that's what he's doing.

this isn't new. companies like intel have already been reshoring for about 10 years, and they are already using prison labour. however, if trump wants to ramp this up, he needs a lot of slave labour, and he needs it fast. vagracy laws are how he's going to get it, by mimicking the vagrancy laws of the jim crow era.