Re: Through the amnesty known as the "guest-worker" program, you are importing competition and outsourcing jobs. This results in depressed wages covering the full spectrum of employment. Mass immigration-generated wage depression exceeds $200 billion annually,...
"The full spectrum of employment"?!? I don't think so... As I pointed out in my previous post #22870, the IT revolution is enforcing a new division of labor upon the industrialized powers that be. Ricardianites and "Comparative Advantage" advocates were right in their theory that every country somehow ends up in a "production niche" that best suits its factors of production (manpower, available capital, public infrastructures [ports, railroads,...]). However, they got it upside down! As western scholars belonging to the most advanced economies, they --and their corporate followers-- wrongly assumed that "the West" (that is, the US, Europe and, willy-nilly, Japan) had a birth right to high-skilled, intellectual labor and that the West would for ever be able to keep its edge over "third/second-world wannabes". They failed to grasp that the jobs that were most likely to be outsourced and farmed out overseas were NOT the low-skilled ones but the high-skilled, computer- and IT-based jobs.
After all, it doesn't take a labor expert to figure out that cabbies, shoeshine boys, construction trades, caretakers for the elderly, office security guards/janitors, pizza delivery businesses, etc. are not gonna be farmed out to India or China any time soon!! Those are the jobs that will remain in the US/Europe to be filled by locals (or (il)legal immigrants). The computer programmers, webdesigners, data encoders, consumer electronics manufacturers, health cyberconsultants, cybernews editors, cyber-tour operators, cyber-stockbrokers, cyber-gambling and online casinos, cyber-bookstores, etc., on the other hand, make up the bulk of top-tier, high-skilled activities most likely --most easily-- outsourced to low-waged countries.
So, let's face it: as China and India (and Malaysia, Korea,...) keep eating away at the top-tier, high-skilled job market, both the US and Europe will fall ever lower down the food chain.... ending up with the un-outsourcable drudgery and bottom-feeders --not the other way round.
Gus |
