With all due respect, I don’t see that happening. How can you prohibit a company from having customer service reps overseas? From law firms sending routine work to India, particularly when the clients demand it? The US firms will just sent their legal work to London and get it offshored to India from there. Is that a plus? We have never had tariffs on services, and most of the jobs being offshored are service jobs.

Having the dollar fall is similar to imposing tariffs. It makes foreign goods more costly. But everything I have read indicates it will not lead to a repatriation of jobs. We have sent entire industries, such as shoe manufacture and textiles, overseas. They aren’t coming back. We no longer have the infrastructure or the skills. You might get a wee bit of high end, craft work, but that’s about it.

Did you read the posts to which I provided the links in my reply to your last post? Tariffs and trade policy are not the linchpin to this problem. It’s about the objectives of commerce. As long as the mission is defined as serving investors and shareholders, there is no way labor/the middle classes will come out ahead. There will be empty symbolic protectionist moves and things will continue much as they are now.

William Greider had an excellent article a few years ago in which he pointed out that our system was not of free trade, but of managed trade. We play the game to promote the interests of our corporations. Other countries are more interested in workers’ wages and in having trade surpluses. So the problem isn’t trade, its’ our objectives in our trade negotiations.

Well, the prospective savings of offshoring have to be balanced against the cost of tariffs.

The idea is to attach a cost to offshoring.

I think it’s inevitable, and not just for the labor market, but possibly more urgently, for the environment. Even a Republican e.g. Schwarzenegger was quoted a few weeks ago musing that countries that severely pollute need to face tariff consequences. This is a method of attaching a cost to the race to the bottom not only wrt labor, but also to pollution and the environment.

“Free” trade is used to undercut all the standards of liberal democracy, including that of a sustainable environment.

To Yves’ point, take Stan O’Neal’s $161 million exit package. Divide that by $6,00 an hour (the wages at the plant in the article), then 40 for 40 hours a week, then 50 for 50 work weeks a year.

Stan’s package is worth 13,417 man years at that plant. The top end of the food chain is taking a lot more out of the middle class than the bottom.

The article said the entire workforce had turned over three times since the immigration raids, which means that the average employee lasted three months, they were still 300 workers short, and were looking to bring Laotian Hmong in from Minnesota. This is hardly a picture of jobs being taken from Americans. Slaughterhouse work is simply dreadful, and even Americans who lack other choices can’t stomach the work.

Wage competition at the bottom of the bottom 20% of jobs is not destroying the middle class. The far bigger culprit is the shift in the distribution of returns away from labor and towards capital. That suggest if you want to help both lower and middle income workers, unions and tax policies are the better way to go.

What good does imposing tariffs do when, as Alan Blinder tells us, 30 to 40 million US jobs are offshorable? You now see good white collar jobs going overseas. If you are worried about the middle classes, this is a far bigger deal than wetbacks picking crops or acting as housemaids or gardeners.

I suggest you read this post, this post, which discusses the breakdown of the post war social contract, and this one on role of wage and tax policy.

I am sympathetic to the eroding position of the middle class, but it has far more to to with how much more the people at the top are taking than the impact of immigration, whether legal or not.

I don’t see how your advocacy of a higher minimum wage addresses this issue – those employers who might leave if cheap and exploitable illegals weren’t available might also leave if the minimum wage were higher.

I no longer believe that the economists and financial professionals are good sources of advice. We’ve done what they said and the middle class is collapsing. We’ve tried your way – now let’s try closed borders and tariffs. Let employers send the jobs to Mexico, and make them pay tariffs to get their goods back in.

I don’t see how the additional material that you pulled from the article proves your point. I think it proves mine.

My point is that 12 million illegals in the USA has made a worse job market for Americans, driven down wages or held them down, and worsened working conditions. That fact that Americans agitate for better conditions and wages after illegals are out of the local job market shows the merit in my view.

Actually, I like what you propose re: language competence and job/reserves. It make sense. Based on that, easing the legal process for legal immigration could make some sense.

But to do that, we will need borders that are secured and laws that are enforced.

Right now we have neither.

I’m actually pretty aggravated about this issue. I’ve voted solidly Democrat for 25+ years, but I find that only really conservative Republicans, whom I never otherwise agree with, stand in the way of various amnesty arrangments. (Just to be clear, *anything* that gives any legal status to an illegal is amnesty in my view. It’s not about citizenship – once they have legal status of any sort they just won the lottery.)

Forgot to address your point more specifically about illegals use of state services. It is often forgotten that many pay taxes. Some have Social Security numbers and pay all their taxes, others have unscrupulous employers who claim to withhold taxes and simply keep the dough. They pay sales taxes in states that have sales taxes.

My perception is that illegals are cautious about using government services, including emergency rooms, precisely due to the risk of detection and deportation. So I am not convinced, net/net, that they cost more than they contribute in revenues (although some states may come out losers). Again, I think there is a lot of fear mongering by people who stand to gain from this line of thought. It’s an argument that plays well in the media, for instance.

I haven’t seen any good analysis, so it you know of any, it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for your comment, but with all the to-ing and fro-ing, the point has gotten obscured.

I am not advocating the status quo. What I am advocating is a much easier immigration process. I will confess to not having thought about it deeply enough to have a well formulated proposal, but I suggested some minimal hurdles as a starting point, such as a basic level of language competence, and if they don’t have a job lined up, demonstration that they have enough financial resources to pay for the time it will likely take them to find work, plus a large margin (say at least 3X). That will have the effect of keeping out the poor who would have difficulty of finding work or might never find work.

The reason for the lengthy discussion of illegals is that I think the issues surrounding them and their impact on the economy are more complex than most people acknowledge. Those threads have gotten mixed up with other issues.

It isn’t as simple as “they are taking jobs from Americans” or “they are a burden on the state.” If anything, from what I can tell, they are hurt by the current system more than is commonly depicted, and the damage suffered by Americans, even lower income Americans, appears to be overstated.

Precisely because by definition most operate in a cash economy, it is hard to have confidence in the data that people present about them. Therefore anecdotes play a big role, which clouds debate.

And as I said, I am a fan of higher minimum wages and of stricter enforcement of labor laws.

I’m all for legal immigration. I like living/working in a country where others can come and contribute and innovate.

But the illegals have got to stop – this is yet another unstustainable trend. It is well known that the construction industry hires many illegals, to do jobs which, once upon a time, not too long ago, paid good wages and paid them to people who are here legally.

The illegals do add additional strain to hospitals and schools which are not allowed to turn them away.

A nation with no borders and no laws is not a nation.

I’m sorry that the rest of the world is mostly very poor. But the answer is not for all of them to come here.