Opinion

Reshoring Pencils for Some Products and Is Fantasy for Others

Reshoring is not a yes-or-no question, and treating it as one is how companies make expensive mistakes in both directions. It is selective, and the landed-cost math draws the exact line between the products that pencil and the ones that are pure press release.

Opinion | By Lena Fournier, Trade & Policy. The argument here is the columnist's own; every figure links to the live series behind it, and opinion is not measurement.

The reshoring debate is broken because it is framed as a referendum: is reshoring happening or is it hype? Reshoring is thousands of product-level decisions with separate landed-cost math. Relevant live context includes currency, with the peso at 17.2454 (Sep 18, 2026); US labor, benchmarked off $30.37/hour; freight, with diesel at $6.53/gal; and machinery import customs value at $93.93B/month. That last series is broad nominal trade value, not installed domestic capacity, so it must be checked against company investment, equipment orders, construction, and installations.

What puts a product on the right side of the line

Reshoring pencils when four conditions line up. Labor content is low or automatable, so the wage gap that favored offshoring barely applies. The product is bulky or heavy, so freight and the long pipeline penalize distance hard. The foreign currency has strengthened, eroding the offshore cost advantage without anyone renegotiating. And the volume is high enough to amortize the capital cost of a new line. Hit those four and the landed-cost math often favors home, not out of patriotism but out of arithmetic. Miss them, and reshoring is a slide in a strategy deck that the spreadsheet never supported.

The honesty check nobody runs

Machinery import data is a possible cross-check, not a test that separates reshoring from theater. The Chapter 84 series is climbing and, on its full five-year archive, the highest in the five-year archive, more than double its February 2022 level. That is a customs-value observation: it includes computers and other goods, mixes price, quantity, currency, and product composition, and does not show where equipment was installed. Only matched investment, order, construction, installation, and output evidence can connect the trend to reshoring.

Reshoring is not a belief. It is a spreadsheet that comes out differently for a heavy, automated part than for a light, hand-built one, and the announcements blur a line the math draws sharply.

The year the customs-value trend changed

Look at the nominal series without turning it into a capacity claim. From 2021 through 2023, machinery import customs value was down 2% across the stretch. From 2023 to today, it is up 162%. That change is real in the dollar record, but its connection to reshoring remains unproven without product mix, quantity, buyer, installation, and output evidence.

The series records declared customs value, not an enormous and rapidly growing physical quantity of production equipment. A higher total can reflect price, currency, computers, product mix, or more equipment, and the aggregate does not identify the buyer or installation site. It is useful corroborating evidence only after those mechanisms are measured.

Imported equipment can support a domestic capacity build, so a machinery customs-value increase is compatible with reshoring. It is not the clearest evidence of it, and a genuine project need not widen this import bill if equipment is sourced domestically or the broad chapter moves for unrelated reasons. Project-level investment and installation records settle the question.

Stop arguing the referendum

The useful posture is to abandon the yes-or-no framing entirely and run the ledger product by product at today's currency, freight, and wage inputs, then rerun it whenever those move, because any of them can flip a marginal case. Reshoring is real for the products where the math says so and fantasy for the ones where it does not, and no amount of policy enthusiasm or offshore-cost nostalgia changes which bucket a given part falls into. The companies that win this decade will be the ones that computed the line instead of arguing about the referendum. For the live count of how many product families currently clear the break-even, the reshoring signal page keeps the tally.

Use the nearshoring landed cost calculator to sort your own products into the ones that pencil and the ones that don't. Run the product-level math

Published 2026-08-06.