Lansing-area families should expect higher prices on everyday goods as the White House moves to shut down a global network of tariff evasion, according to a Michigan State University trade expert.

Oren Ziv, an associate professor of economics at MSU who researches international shipping and trade networks, said the federal crackdown on "transshipping" will eliminate a pipeline of cheaper goods that has kept retail costs down for consumers, even as it protects federal tax revenue.

"Consumers want general products, the same product for less money," Ziv told WILX. "So anything that helps reduce the cost of products would help consumers. And that includes something like this, be it legal transshipment or illegal transshipment."

The White House released a report Thursday, Aug. 13, titled "The Great Transshipment Scam," accusing more than 40 countries of helping Chinese exporters route goods through third nations to dodge U.S. tariffs. The scheme works like this: a product made in China ships to Mexico, gets relabeled as Mexican-made, then enters the U.S. under a lower tariff rate.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told Bloomberg Television the report was "basically a warning to the world," according to Fortune. AI supply chain firm Exiger estimated roughly $75 billion in illegally transshipped goods entered the country between February 2025 and February 2026, costing the federal government an estimated $19 billion to $26 billion in lost tariff revenue annually.

Prices will rise.

That's the bottom line for Lansing shoppers, Ziv said, because the crackdown removes cheaper rerouted goods from the market regardless of whether those goods were legally or illegally transshipped. U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to deploy an AI-powered system called "Detective Border" to run invoice-by-invoice audits, analyzing routing histories, product classifications and packaging imagery.

But Ziv, who has studied customs data with MSU graduate students, said the deception is often too subtle for standard tools. Trade agreements rely on "rules of origin" determined by what percentage of a product's value was added in a given country, making enforcement a question of where specific production steps happened rather than where a finished good was assembled.

What it means for local manufacturers

For Lansing-area manufacturers, the stakes go beyond retail shelves. GM's Lansing Grand River Assembly plant, which builds the Cadillac CT4 and CT5 sedans, operates within the kind of globalized supply chains that Ziv says could face new disruptions as border enforcement tightens.

Ziv pointed to Whirlpool as a cautionary tale. The Benton Harbor, Mich., appliance maker lobbied for tariffs on Chinese appliances in 2018, then got hit with sharply higher costs on imported Chinese steel, a material that makes up roughly half the content of a washing machine. The Cato Institute reported that Whirlpool paid more than $300 million in U.S. tariffs in 2025 and posted an $82 million first-quarter loss in 2026.

Ziv said the question of who wins and who loses from a tariff "can get really complicated and even sometimes have really unpredictable answers."

Trade with China has dropped since heavy tariffs were imposed under both the Trump and Biden administrations, while imports from Mexico, Vietnam and South Korea have surged. The White House attributes part of that shift to illegal transshipping. The U.S. monthly trade deficit in goods and services was $73.3 billion in June, according to Commerce Department data reported by The New York Times.

No timeline has been announced for when the "Detective Border" system will go live at U.S. ports of entry.