By “cheap whitefish” I was refering to hake, a cheap white (fleshed) fish - formerly a trash fish.
Surimi was invented when some of the guys I knew finally found a process in the early 1980s (AIR) that would firm up hake flesh which is otherwise a gooy mess.
Pollock is very simular to true cod and is a valuable fish, not used in surimi - a cheap plastisized, food-dyed molded goo before in is firmed up.
Oregon sucks.
It's been my impression (perhaps I'm amiss in this) that in the earliest inceptions of the Surimi processing business the Jap offshore processors had first used pollock when making the original Surimi, prior to discovery of how to stabilize the flesh of hake (which goes bad quickly) after which the processing changed over to using hake.
As you noted, pollock is more valuable than hake. Not as valuable as pacific cod (the Alaskan kind).
Pollock fillets are nowadays (and for the last few decades) are otherwise sold to the same market segments that use cod, but the pollock is less expensive (and not as good).
How long it would take for McDonalds to eventually find a way to serve up hake-based surimi product in the U.S. is anybody's guess, but unless they change the name and format of the crab sandwich (and lower the price too?) of the new menu item they're trying out (pilot project style) in the SF Bay area -- I doubt they'll attempt to use that 'crab sandwich' as smuggling device.