June 27, 2007 - Foreigners are taking American’s jobs. No, the foreigners are not from Mexico or Nicaragua or Guatemala and they aren’t taking American’s jobs in Dallas or Des Moines or Charleston or Chicago. Spanish speaking immigrants, legal or illegal, aren’t “taking American jobs” as the populist poseurs would have you believe. Their impact on the American employment economy is negligible. They and the political opportunists that have latched onto the immigration issue have hidden the real issue behind a smokescreen behind which the real dislocation of American workers is taking place.

The real threat to the future of the American worker won’t be ameliorated by building an impregnable wall along our southern border. We need a wall alright, but it isn’t a wall to keep workers out. We need a wall to keep jobs in. We need a wall alright, but it isn’t built of steel and stone. We need a wall of policies designed to discourage outsourcing of jobs abroad and encourage repatriation of those jobs already gone. The economic enemy is not hordes of Latinos lined up to migrate to improve their economic lot by working. The economic enemy is a handful of overpaid executives sitting in boardrooms seeking to improve their bonuses by exploiting economic hardship overseas. Before the politicians discovered “illegal immigrants” we recognized that the real threat was the export of jobs we called “outsourcing”.

Don’t believe me? Go to your local Wal-Mart and see for yourself. Don’t bother to look for the union label on the clothing. Nothing in the store was sewn in South Carolina by either Mexican or Anglo workers. You will look in vain for a package of anything labeled Made In USA. We can’t make it here any more. Motorola invested $31 Million ten years ago to build a software design facility at the University of Illinois Research Park. Last week they announced it was closing at the cost of 180 software engineering jobs. That work will be done by a contractor in Mumbai, India. We can’t do it here anymore. Tom McMurtry sings about it in one of the new protest songs for a new century.

Immigrant laborers aren’t sewing our clothes, manufacturing our televisions or computers or I-pods. Those jobs don’t exist here anymore. The closest you can get to an American car is a Toyota assembled in the United States from parts shipped in from Korea, China, Singapore or elsewhere. Japanese cars aren’t even made in Japan anymore. Mexicans are building Ford automobiles but they are building them in Mexico not in Michigan.You won’t regain American jobs by building a fence at the border. You won’t rebuild an American economy by keeping Mexicans from digging our ditches, picking our peaches or trimming our bushes. You can only protect American jobs by adopting tariff and tax policies that make it more expensive to make things in Bangladesh and ship them to Bangor than to make it here in the first place. Tariffs to equalize the labor cost of a commodity along with confiscatory taxes on profits exacted from the labor of exploited workers in Asia and Latin America can restore our manufacturing economy. We can make it here again.