The import ledger is a map.

There's something strange about the way we talk about imports in this country. We say the United States bought this much from China, or imported that much from Mexico, or ran a trade deficit of some enormous number, as though the country itself sat down one afternoon and placed a single giant purchase order — when what actually happened is that thousands of American companies bought millions of different products from manufacturers all over the world, one purchase order at a time. In 2025 alone, those individual decisions added up to roughly $4.36 trillion in imported goods and services and a trade deficit of about $932 billion, according to Census Bureau data.

The distinction between a national statistic and a pile of individual purchases might sound academic, but I'd argue it's one of the most important ways to understand import substitution. Once you stop treating imports as a single number and start looking at the purchases underneath it, what you're really looking at is evidence of demand for specific products — because a company buys something for a reason. Behind every line on the ledger sits a specification, an existing supplier, a purchasing history, a price being paid, and a place in somebody's supply chain where that product belongs. If the goal is bringing more manufacturing home, that's about as valuable as information gets.

Why “What Else Could You Make?” Is the Wrong First Question

For years, the question we've put to American manufacturers has been some version of the same thing: what else could you make? It sounds reasonable until you sit with it for a minute. A manufacturer may know its equipment, its processes, its materials, and its people extremely well, yet still have no visibility into every product being purchased somewhere else in the country that might happen to fit those capabilities — and no realistic way of finding out on its own.

This is where the import ledger starts earning its keep. Every shipment entering the U.S. gets classified under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS), a product-level coding system maintained by the U.S. International Trade Commission that spans more than 17,000 unique classification codes, and the U.S. Census Bureau publishes trade data against those codes every month. Taken together, that ledger describes American demand in remarkable detail — product by product, month by month, port by port.

The Real Problem: Demand and Capability Aren't Connected

Consider a company that regularly buys rubber foam from an overseas supplier. There may well be an American manufacturer in the same state working with the same types of materials, running similar processes on equipment that could plausibly produce that exact product, and yet neither company has any particular reason to know the other exists. The problem, in cases like this, isn't that America has lost the capability to make something — it's that the demand and the capability are sitting in different places with nothing connecting them.

That's why domestic supplier discovery has to go beyond a directory listing of who makes what. It has to get down to the product-demand level, where import activity can be classified and compared against what American manufacturers already produce. Do that well, and you start surfacing commercial conversations that would otherwise be nearly impossible to see.

The Right Questions to Ask About Imports

Not every import is a reshoring opportunity, but many are, and they deserve a closer look — considering that every $1.00 spent in manufacturing generates a total impact of $2.69 across the overall economy, one of the largest multipliers of any sector, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

So let's get in the habit of asking better questions about imports: what is the buyer purchasing, how often are they buying it, where is it coming from, what does the current landed cost look like, and which American manufacturers might be able to make it? Those are the questions that move reshoring out of the abstract and into an actual business conversation — and answering them at scale is exactly what we're building at Reshore Technologies.

Start With What America Is Already Buying

If we're serious about rebuilding manufacturing capacity in the United States, we can't start only with what we wish companies would make. We have to start with what American companies are already buying, understand that demand at the product level, and then go find the manufacturers who may be able to meet it. That's why the import ledger matters: it doesn't just show us what we're buying from overseas, it shows us where to start looking for what we can make here.

✱ Bring Manufacturing Home.