Just try to buy an American-made brassiere in this country. Lots of luck. The tag may say “Made in USA,” but that could mean American materials were stitched together in Central America. Yet the Bush administration has slapped quotas on certain Chinese textiles including brassieres.

American firms do still produce other items on this new hit list – knit fabric and dressing gowns, but they represent only a small fraction of the industry and relatively few jobs. The problem is that the imposition of the new quotas has whetted demands by textile companies and unions for expanded restrictions to cover the rest of the $10 billion in clothing and fabric imports from China.

American retailing organizations fear that the new quotas will spur a new surge of protectionism that would lead to higher prices for products ranging from bedroom furniture to television sets. J. Craig Shearman, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation, is quoted as saying, “The administration is balancing the desire to save several thousand manufacturing jobs against the interest of millions and millions of consumers to by the products they want at prices they can afford.” Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, warned that “clouds of emerging protectionism” raised new risks for the global economy. Worried investors promptly helped plunge the dollar to a new low against the euro and drop sharply against the Japanese yen.

Unlike the administration’s illegal steel tariffs, now threatened with $2 billion legal retaliatory European sanctions, the textile quotas are legal. A World Trade Organization rule allows “safeguard” restrictions if it can show disruption of markets. But both actions, clearly intended to buy votes in such states as North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio, threaten a global trade system that benefits the United States like other countries. While those three states may see gains from protectionism, they also are paying more for steel imports and will pay dearly for imported clothing and textiles.

As for those brassieres, most U.S. makers long ago moved their production to Mexico and Central America. Workers there assemble them largely from fabric and elastic imported from the United States. That’s the way the global economy works. The Bush administration should put policy ahead of politics and stop catering to protectionism.