(AmericanProsperity.com) – The Biden Administration has announced new steps to get rid of what they call the “overuse and abuse” of a trade law that permits low-value shipments to enter the United States without paying import duties or processing fees.
This new rule would bar overseas shipments of products that are subjected to the U.S.-China tariffs from being eligible for the special customs exemption.
The loophole is known as the de minimis loophole, and it allows packages with a value less than eight hundred dollars to enter the U.S. with little scrutiny. Over the past ten years, the amount of de minimis shipments has increased to over a billion shipments, according to a White House estimate.
Daleep Singh, deputy national security advisor for international economics, said, “The drastic increase in de minimis shipments has made it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments coming into the U.S.”
Officials have said that the reason these de minimis shipments have increased is due to Chinese-linked online retailers like Temu and SHEIN. They ship millions of dollars worth of goods from factories in China to the United States thanks to this exemption.
Each of these packages are worth far less than eight hundred dollars, especially because of their known discounted prices, which makes them qualify for the de minimis exemption.
”Since approximately seventy percent of Chinese textile and apparel imports are subject to section 301 tariffs, this step will drastically reduce the number of shipments entering through the de minimis exemption,” said Singh.
The White House announced a new rule that would “require specific, additional data for de minimis shipments – including the ten-digit tariff classification number and the person claiming the de minimis exemption,” if implemented.
The Biden administration is also pushing Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the original de minimis rules.
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