Isn't that journey possible if you just use an American flagged ship with a crew of Americans starting at Coatzacoalcos, Mexico? In the original article you linked [2] I didn't see any mention of how using Americans would be cost prohibitive.
Which IIUC is to try to offload some of the costs of keeping a ship building industry onto private industry [1].
American crews are way more expensive than foreign crews, and even then there just aren't many Americans who want to go into sailing - it's a tough and sometimes dangerous job with a terrible work-life balance. It's a good way to escape third world poverty, but most Americans have better prospects.
And here is the real motivation. They want to replace trucking with external non-American salaried workers. No thanks. What a garbage position to take.
Yeah that is the problem I keep running into when justifying removal of the jones act. I am anti-jones act on a theoretical basis as part of a holistic plan to deregulate the industry and labor.
But it seems especially fucked up to keep US minimum wage / protections in place while simultaneously not requiring the same thing for foreign flagged corporations performing the same service in a domestic capacity. As you say it's basically saying "if the trucker is American, follow us labor laws. IF the trucker is foreign, race to the bottom." Except instead of trucker it's domestic ship crew flying under a different flag. In practice it's just as bad as protectionism except -- it's protectionism for foreign labor and indeed works against the goals of even the Cato institute. It's the ocean going equivalent of allowing that foreign owned gas station on American soil to go by a completely different set of labor laws than an American owned gas station on American soil. And I say that as someone who really hates the principle of the Jones Act on ideological grounds.
Personally I would just completely deregulate US shipping, eliminate maritime labor laws and protections, and then kill the jones act. Everybody gets to go on equal footing. But with the system we live in, without overhauling it significantly, the Jones Act does make sense on some level.
When people actually don't want to do a job - the answer isn't necessarily to close down the whole industry.
Right now carpenters are in very short supply. An hourly rate of a carpenter in Hudson Valley is higher than Senior Engineer at Meta.... and there's less carpenters...