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October 28, 2019

U.S. Lawmakers Ask For New Aluminum Import Monitoring System

As the Aluminum Association reported, last week a bipartisan group of members of Congress sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross calling for the creation of an aluminum import monitoring system in the United States. The lawmakers said such a system would give the U.S. government “new tools to identify trends and trade flows to determine if there is circumvention or evasion” of existing duties. The letter noted the Canadian government recently expanded its import monitoring system.

The lawmakers concluded, “An aluminum import monitoring system is a necessary step to ensure that all aluminum producers are operating on a level playing field in a fair, rules-based global trading system.”

Click here to read the letter.

As a reminder, in comments to the U.S. Department of Commerce in June 2017, the Metals Service Center Institute requested that the U.S. Department of Commerce, along with the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the International Trade Commission “monitor and provide public reports on imports of substrate metals that are subject to tariffs, as well as imports of downstream products that are produced from those substrate metals that are subject to tariffs.”

MSCI also advised that, “if companies are diverting substrate metals for importation into the United States in order to circumvent tariffs that were imposed to remedy dumping or state subsidies” the U.S. government “consider additional mechanisms beyond those that are already in place to provide relief to the domestic downstream supply chain.”

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