Protecting U.S. Dredgers Kills Jobs: The Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 has stifled competition in the seaport industry

By Nancy McLernon in The WSJ. She is president and CEO of Organization for International Investment. Excerpts:

"The Foreign Dredge Act was an effort to protect America’s fledgling shipbuilding and seaport industries so they could compete with old-world rivals. The law survives, mostly unchanged, and international companies remain in Washington’s regulatory drydock."

"The problem is that U.S. dredging companies simply aren’t capable of meeting demand. The four largest free-market dredging companies, all based in Belgium or the Netherlands, could complete the U.S. projects for half the estimated cost and a third of the time—if Washington allowed them to compete. In the past decade, these companies have invested $15 billion in new dredgers, while the entire U.S. market invested only $1 billion. The European equipment is larger than any American company’s and handles more than 90% of the world’s open-bid dredging projects.

These international companies have succeeded in their home markets and elsewhere. If they could set up operations in the U.S., they would bring world-class training and techniques and other benefits in addition to the needed capital. Opening the dredging market would spark an infrastructure boom that would result in thousands of new, unionized dredging jobs for Americans.

The real jobs jackpot, however, would come from having the ports deepened in the next five years. This accelerated modernization would create more than 1.5 million new American jobs in port construction, services, manufacturing, warehousing, trucking, logistics and more. Radically slicing export costs would spur manufacturing."