Mr. Trump’s Twitter post was not entirely accurate. He said Toyota would build a new Corolla factory in Baja, but the company is actually planning to build a new plant in Guanajuato, Mexico. (It already has a factory in Baja.) More significant, Toyota’s new plant in Mexico will not replace any of its 10 factories in the United States, where the company employs 136,000 people. The company said it had invested about $21.9 billion in the United States.
“I think being fair is not really in the playbook of the president-elect,” said Takuji Okubo, managing director and chief economist at Japan Macro Advisors.
Toyota builds Corollas in Cambridge, Ontario, as well as in Blue Springs, Miss. No workers in either of those plants will lose jobs, and when Toyota opens the new facility in Mexico, the company plans to shift the Canadian workers to making small RAV4 sport utility vehicles.
According to Hiroshige Seko, Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry, Japanese carmakers manufactured about 3.86 million cars in the United States in 2015, up from 1.5 million in the 1990s, and employ about 1.5 million people.
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