President Trump obviously has strong feelings about China: It should buy more American stuff. We should buy less Chinese stuff. He’s so sure of this he’s willing to spook financial markets by imposing tariffs and threatening a trade war.

Trump has singled out the auto industry as one that’s particularly imbalanced. China imposes tariffs of 25% on auto imports from the United States, while Chinese-made cars imported to the United States face a mere 2.5% tariff. Trump wants China to lower its tariffs and import more American cars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping recently indicated that might happen.

What’s more likely, however, is a surge of Chinese-made cars coming to the US market. Americans bought about 50,000 made-in-China cars in 2017, but that figure is expected to swell to 225,000 in 2019 and 500,000 in 2023, according to forecasts form the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. And those won’t be strange-sounding Chinese brands, but cars built in China by well-known automakers such as Buick, Volvo and Ford.

Automakers sold about 267,000 US-made cars in China last year, according to research firm LMC Automotive. So the United States actually has a surplus of trade in automobiles with China, for now. But the number of US-made cars exported to China has been going down, while the number of Chinese-made cars coming to America has been going up, and LMC forecasts a dip to about 240,000 US-made cars exported to China by 2020. So a trade surplus in this one industry could become a deficit before long—exactly the thing that so irks Trump.

The American and Chinese car markets are very different, and most big automakers already have an established presence in both. Since labor and production costs are higher in the United States, it’s cheaper to build cars in China. The Buick Envision crossover, which went on sale in 2016, was the first Chinese-made car exported to the United States. Volvo, now owned by the Chinese automotive giant Geely, also exports a couple Chinese-made variants of its S60 sedan to the United States, though most S60s come from Europe.

Ford will begin making its Focus subcompact in China in 2019, and importing that to the United States, which will account for much of the coming increase in Chinese auto imports. Ford builds the outgoing version of the Focus in Michigan, and originally planned to build the next generation in Mexico—but then moved planned production to China last year. Profit margins on small cars are tiny, and sales have been shriveling. Ford, like most automakers, decided to move small-car production overseas while building higher-margin vehicles like pickups and SUVs at its US plants.