Daft, what is being discussed is structural steel products, not little stuff like knives and such.
The company that I used to work for is the #2 steel producer in the U.S and we never went crying to the government about imports.
You know why? It's because we were an efficent producer and based our costs on even if offshore producers made their beams and shapes for free, they still have to pay freight to get it here, and we always managed to stay right around that number for our production costs.
We saw a loooong time back that if the company were to survive, we would have to be THE low cost producer.
I attended a steelmaking conference in 1988 and our CEO was a speaker, and during one of his speaches, he said,"ok, lose all the tarriffs, forget subsidies, we can compete in an open market"
Well, that brought much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the likes of all the reps from U.S steel, Bethleham, LTV, and the like.
The main targets of the tarriffs are/were the Korean steel and some of the Eastern European producers who are dumping products here at a cost that is less than what it takes for them to make it.
I agree that if you can't be efficent, you either get efficent, or you die. For a while, believe it or not, we were the ONLY steel plant that was EXPORTING steel to Japan. We also had agreements with some British producers to supply some of our size ranges when the market was booming a few years back and couldn't make enough to supply the demand.
We also had an agreement with Mexican Rebar producers to be a broker for their products here in the states to control the amount of steel they sent across the border. It's a prime example of "if ya can't beat 'em, join 'em"
Instead of crying to the government for tarriffs and restrictions, we had an agreement to buy from them and sell it at a price that was profitable for both parties.
If you dig deep enough, you will probably find that those who pushed this tarriff crap are the big dinosaurs of the industry who don't wan't modernize and will soon fall by the wayside if they don't.
The last numbers that I saw, it took the big integrated producers something like 8 man hours per ton to make steel. The Japanese were doing it at about 4 man hours/ton.
Our man hours/ton?.............1
There will always be a need for some integrated producers to make the raw steel from iron ore and produce some of the larger sizes, but the majority of the U.S market is served by the scrap based "mini-mills" that are by and large much more efficent than the large producers.
www.chaparralsteel.com 
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