I’m not saying global integration wasn’t ever discussed or considered, just that historically, the primary driver behind de minimis was administrative efficienc

I’m not saying global integration wasn’t ever discussed or considered, just that historically, the primary driver behind de minimis was administrative efficiency. You can trace it all the way back to original rule in the 30s. The idea was that the cost of collecting duty on low-value goods often exceeded the revenue collected, so it made sense to wave them through. That’s very different from encouraging large-scale commercial exploitation. When entire logistics chains are built specifically to stay under the threshold, intentionally bypassing duties that domestic importers would have to pay, that’s a policy failure, not a success. You can absolutely argue that it incidentally helped smaller exporters or increased consumer access, but that’s a long way from saying it was intended to support global e-commerce platforms arbitraging regulatory gaps. You asked what factors were weighed—labor costs and shipment volume handling, sure. Maybe some light consumer benefit. But "building duty-free pipelines for billion-dollar drop-shippers" probably wasn’t in the memo.