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Outsourcing Mania
Back in the late 1980s, I had to go through major hoops for the INS before I could employ a graphic artist fluent in English, Spanish, and Japanese for my ad agency to fulfill a client's need. He was the only qualified candidate but was not an American citizen, and the INS insisted that I pay him as much as an American.
The single most important factor in our “immigration problem” – employers hiring “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented workers” (take your pick) is because they will work for less money than Americans workers. In other words, our problem is not an immigration problem, it’s an economic one.
The way to address it is to crack down – hard! – on businesses that break the law and hire people who do not have a work permit and so will work illegally for substandard wages. Once you stop employers from hiring illegal workers, you stanch the flow of immigrants crossing our borders illegally.
The same corporate lust for profits is at work in the whole “outsourcing” business – instead of paying substandard wages here, they’re doing it over there. Outsourcing is not about some high-and-mighty notion of creating a competitive “global marketplace” – it’s about corporations shipping jobs to places where they can pay slave wages to benefit their bottom line.
At around the same time, General Electric’s then-CEO Jack Welch realized he could outsource many of his pink- and white-collar jobs to India and other English-speaking countries, saving his company a fortune but putting Americans out of work.
Also around the same time Alan Greenspan, the Ronald Reagan-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman, believed one of our big problems was “wage inflation,” a term he only applied to the earnings of working-class people, and never to the stratospheric salaries paid to CEOs and other corporate executives, and he worked to keep wages down.
The solutions lie in following the strategies that brought us sustained success in creating a stable middle class in the mid-20th century.
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