By Debbie Gregory.

Since 2001, California has lost more jobs to China than any other state. Approximately 562,500 of the state’s jobs, a 3.34% share of California’s 16.8 million jobs in 2017, were outsourced.

The main losses are due to technical outsourcing by Northern Californian Silicon Valley companies, as well as Southern California’s apparel industry.

According to a recently released report entitled “The China Toll Deepens,” the trade deficit in the computer and electronic parts industry grew the most.

This comes as President Trump’s trade war with China continues to escalate, with the administration imposing $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.

The report, coauthored by Economist Robert Scott and Research Assistant Zane Mokhiber states that the growth of the U.S. trade deficit with China, which has increased by more than $100 billion since the beginning of the Great Recession, almost entirely explains why manufacturing employment has not fully recovered along with the rest of the economy. And the growing trade deficit with China isn’t just a post-recession phenomenon hitting manufacturing: it has cost the U.S. millions of jobs throughout the economy since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, a finding validated by numerous studies.

Scott said that Republican-supported tax cuts and spending increases will turbocharge the U.S. budget deficit with “a sugar-high that pushes up interest rates, attracting capital from abroad and strengthening the dollar.” He added, “Hitting China with 25% tariffs is not the solution.”

Los Angeles economist Sung Won Sohn said that even as much of California’s computer and electronics hardware manufacturing moved to Asia, “a lot of software jobs were created in Silicon Valley, and a lot of the hardware we import from China and Korea uses software manufactured in the U.S.”

Sohn cautioned that the numbers in the institute report may be “overstated,” but he added, “the conclusions are correct: We are losing jobs as a result of the huge trade deficit, and I blame much of it on unfair trade practices by China.”

After California, the states with the highest losses were Texas (314,000) New York (183,500), Illinois (148,200) and Pennsylvania (136,100).