In today's Union Leader (New Hampshire, USA), the president of Standard Textile Co., based in Cincinnati, says that American producers should adapt to low-cost producers, rather than lobbying Congress to impose import restrictions:

The American textile industry, my industry, should stop asking the American people to bail it out because of its failure to adapt to the global economy. That is essentially what industry trade groups have been doing with their efforts to retain artificial barriers to Chinese textile and apparel imports, which reportedly jumped 47 percent in January and have continued to surge...

It's not too late for more U.S. textile companies to shift course and adapt. Their survival will depend in large part on their ability to innovate and stay a step ahead of competitors elsewhere. Researchers have only just begun to figure out how nanotechnology, bioengineering and other relatively new disciplines can create the clothes that our grandchildren will wear. Technological ingenuity has always created new American jobs in the past. This can - and must - happen in my industry.