One senses that those rewarded the biggest quotas are rewarded to those who have their production or marketing organized to some great extent by US transnational corporations--most 'trade' seems to be intrafirm trade. Greider did recently make the point that the world trading system is not organized freely but made up of such deals. Given the class nature of the US state, one can infer that the bans or tarriffs or low quotas it will actually impose on 'third world' imports--called for by Palley, EPI, etc--will tend be on those produced and marketed outside the influence of US companies as a way of aiding the centralisation and concentration of US capital in the American market and on the world stage. This means ability to export to the US market will not be determined in a rational way by human need or 'fairly' but by the valorization requirements of the already concentrated and centralised capital in the US.
These outsiders will simply be consigned to suppliers of last resort to the US market.. Once we move beyond the utopian visions of these reformers--based on a naive state fetishism--we obviously should not expect anything else. It is rather fantastic to think the US state would or could protect US labor instead of invoking the name of US labor when consolidating the dominance of US corporations. Prasidh is thus probably incorrect to think the low quotas are due to the pressure of US unions, instead of US business which probably is not that well represented among the foreign investors and marketers in Cambodia.The garment exports will simply come from such other low wage country. If Cambodian garment production and marketing were more deeply interpenetrated with US capital, one can expect that the quota would have been bigger. Import quotas, arbitrarily applied, are probably best understood as a political mechanism for the centralisation of imperialist capital on a world scale rather than a labor protection mechanism.
Well that's my highly speculative take with which Michael P and others will probably righthly take issue.
Yours, Rakesh