People say “our jobs are going overseas” as though there were a fixed number of jobs. While it’s true that there are only so many cars to be sold in the US in any given year, it’s also true that there’s really plenty of work to go around. Not, mind you, that there are good jobs for everyone who wants one, but that “jobs” are not fixed in number. Increasing the wealth and well-being of the world will eventually mean that the US auto industry has a lot more cars to sell in, say, India, and China, than it could possibly have imagined if it stuck to manufacturing and selling only in the US and Europe.
There are many things to be done, and we should in general seek the most efficient way to perform them, so that individual people can be freed up to do other work. Arguing that building cars in Mexico or running call centers in India is taking work away from the US is an awful lot like arguing that using a mechanical reaping and sowing machine takes work away from the individual people with scythes and sacks of grain.
It does, of course– they’re unemployed, and the upheaval caused by the mass migration of unemployed former peasants to the city was a huge part of the industrial revolution, and it wasn’t pretty or easy. But we’re better off for it, I think, than we would be if we were still depending on manual farming techniques. We’re not regularly subject to famine, for example. We have different clothes to wear every day of the week. And people don’t all have to be peasants– they can be personal trainers, or massage therapists, or tool-and-die stampers, or software engineers.
There’s a lot of software that needs to be written in this world, a lot of things that need to be manufactured. The increase in jobs in developing countries can and will be a good thing; whether it’s a rough ride or worse depends on regulation and process.
We need to make sure that companies aren’t abusing tax shelters, that environmental regulations are obeyed (and standardized globally), and that minimum wage and employee protection laws are enacted and obeyed. If Mexican factory workers had sane, healthy working conditions, it’d be a better world on both sides of the border.
Later, I will explain why huge amounts of immigration should be legalized. In fact, I can say it in one phrase: legal immigrants pay more taxes, and those taxes support the services rendered to the legal immigrants, plus they support social security, which is in dire need of young able-bodied workers on the legitimate tax rolls.
Secretly Ironic 