Reuter's "immigration reform" article
Joseph Dunphy
I'll limit my commentary on this article for now to a few simple
observations:
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Sheridan Bailey is offering workers $20 an hour to
raise the steel building frames that are giving the U.S. city of
Phoenix a taller skyline. Only thing is, he can't find any.
"When we advertise, people don't show up, or if they do, they are not
qualified," said Bailey, the chief executive officer of Ironco
Enterprises. ...
Rest of the article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1448294620070614?feedType=RSS
If you look at that article, do you notice just how much coverage is
given to the arguments of those opposed to this so-called reform:
"Opponents of the Washington bill from both main parties argue that it
rewards law breakers and takes jobs away from U.S.-born workers -- an
assertion disputed by both the government and many employers."
Yes, that's right - less than a sentence is given to even mentioning
their views, and no space at all to the arguments they offer in
support of those views. The views of that side are alluded to, attacks
on those views described, and their responses never heard. This
article is an editorial masquerading as a newsstory, editorializing in
support of a position that one would need a well developed case of
amnesia to take seriously. The implication of the article would seem
to be that "unskilled" labor can not be had for love or money in the
United States because the illegal immigrants won't be given amnesty,
and that labor is holding all of the cards when time comes for
negotiations.
Really? The very fact that an article that discusses the alleged
difficulties in finding unskilled labor begins with a discussion of
the difficulties somebody was having in finding "qualified"
construction workers to build him a few skyscapers in Phoenix might
tell one a little about the attitude that went into writing this
article. Boy and girls - quick show of hands: how many of you would
have any business being on such a construction site? These are, in
fact, highly skilled positions, involving the doing of work that is
highly dangerous, in a job market that is, reportedly, doing far
better than that of the majority of cities in the US:
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/04/12/story6.html
Having been there in the last few years, I can certainly report that
the place looked like it was doing a lot better than, say, Chicago.
So, in an article that poses as a fairminded portrayal of the impact
of the proposed "immigration reform" (read: amnesty program for
illegal aliens), one finds the author not only beginning with a
mention of somebody's difficulties in hiring skilled labor - making
the whole illustration an exercise in bait and switch - but the author
(Tim Gaynor) cites an off-point example that isn't even typical of its
class of off-point examples. Think, for a second, about just how much
fun it would not be, to be out in the sun, next to a blowtorch, in the
middle of a Phoenix summer afternoon. I was out there in January, and
we all needed water and shade. I can only imagine what the place must
be like in August, and there are no air conditioners up on a scaffold.
One then has the least representative example of a job position
imaginable being offered as an illustration of a direction that the
entire economy is supposely moving in, with the poor, helpless hapless
employer powerless to find help, no matter how much he bows and
scrapes before the mighty worker. Really? That's funny, because just a
short while back, Yahoo jobs ran this article
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/jobseeker/tools/ept/careerArticlesPost.html?post=96
in which an employee whose ideas were being plagiarized by his
supervisor was warned to not complain to the higher ups about this
clear breach of professional ethics, because of the consequences for
his career, and was told to soft pedal his complaint. Just how
radically empowered did that employee sound. As for the difficulties
employers have in filling skilled positions, as I mentioned in a past
blog post, one can easily find employers making their own problems in
this area,
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Ic4OZGcydKumZcPZUAfwPxBrDATXgr72KXYfNQ--?cq=1&p=21
and a good deal of this "we need more people" complaining, when the
spin is removed, translates into "we don't have labor so flat on its
back that as we capriciously destroy employee's lives, we find the
people we're destroying to be quite as easily replacable as we had
hoped they would be". Raising the question, seldom if ever addressed,
of exactly how aiding in the disempowerment and economic ruination of
the American workforce became a legitimate function of the government
in Washington which, for the sake of what some would call "the free
market", is being seriously asked to interfere in that market in order
to secure an advantage for its wealthiest participants at the expense
of its least wealthy. Doing this being referred to as - and I have to
muffle a laugh as I write this - progressive politics. So I guess it's
irony all around?
The usual excuse offered for calling this roundabout attempt to steal
from the poor and give to the rich "progressive" is to say that
globalization is the only route to alleviating third world poverty,
but that's a baldfaced lie. Back when Russia was the country of the
hour to discuss and tarriffs were still with us, I mentioned a
possible alternative
and this being the 90s, got treated to the contribution of yet another
netizen who decided to make his own reality as he tried to deny the
existence of the tolerance problem for Russian-made parts,
illustrating why Usenet became as useless for serious discussions as
it remains to this day - discussions there become unrooted from
anything external to themselves, it seems. But the argument, as
unfashionable as it has been for all this time, remains in place, and
the basic idea I advanced back then was hardly original with me. The
idea goes back at least as far as the Marshall Plan when, wonder of
wonders, governmental activism in the economy not only produced
positive results, but brought us most of the wealthy economies of
Western Europe, whose countries, in the post-WWII devastation, had
attained third world status. Yes, where there is a will, poor
countries can be helped to become wealthy countries, very often on a
very reasonable timetable. But that's the thing - these days, even
among supposed liberals, there really is no will to do so.
Bills like this are not about Jose, the brilliant chemical engineer
from Sao Paulo whose contributions aren't going to be known of by
humanity, purely because he didn't grown up in the Hamptons - though
maybe they are a little bit about Fred, the equally brilliant chemical
engineer from Englewood whose career is about to suffer the same fate
as Jose's, for the same reason. Bills like this are about Consuela the
housekeeper, whose presence in this country is vital, lest her trust
fund baby employer discover that he has to do his own dishes and mow
his own glass. They're about that mouthy garment worker Luigi who -
can you imagine this - actually wants to go home at night before he
physically collapses, wants to earn enough to reliably put food on his
family's table and hey, wouldn't mind at all if his children saw him
often enough to know who he was. They're about that blowhard John who
pulls down a luxurious $6/hour in a poultry processing plant, and is
still whining about how his buddy lost a hand at work, and thinks that
those antiquated worker safety regulations ought to be adhered to or
worse - expanded! I mean, my G-d, it's like those people expect ... to
be treated like people.
That's the thing - by and large, for the last few decades, being
treated on the job like you're a human being has gone from being
something viewed as being more or less a given, to being seen as a
privilege that has become harder and harder to win. Make the job
search enough of a cattle call, and employers won't have to give it
out to those among the hoi polloi at all and kids - the hoi polloi is
you and me, for the most part, no matter how hard we work and no
matter how much we know and can do. The very rich may be able to buy
the newspaper coverage they want, but they can't buy our gullibility
unless we're foolish enough to offer it to those whose ill intentions
haven't only been out in the open for all to see for decades, but in
so many ways been advertised in a haughtly, sneering tone directed
toward those in the lower orders, who've been told to accept the
inescapability of their station in life, and then told to forget what
they heard earlier when all of a sudden, the powerful aren't looking
invinciable any more.
The real question is, will the rest of us be stupid enough to agree to
do so?
Joseph Dunphy
Joseph Dunphy
one obvious to anybody familiar with the distinction between
"necessity" and "sufficiency". While globalization may be unnecessary
for the ending of poverty in the Third World, as historical experience
in Western Europe suggests, and indeed may not prove particularly
helpful as the fiasco that is the post-Cold War non-development of
Eastern Europe would imply, is it compatible with that goal?
As I will argue, the answer to that question is a clear, unequivocal
"no". Globalization is a recipe for disaster, not just for the First
World nations it will impoverish, but for the Third World nations
which, having made the Faustian bargain of destroying much, most or
even all of their traditional cultures in exchange for wealth, will be
deprived in the end of the very prize they have sacrificed all to get.
The reward for all the sacrifice, if it is pursued without yielding
indefinitely, will in the end be something not seen in recorded
history: a global dark age, mankind's legacy of cultural and material
wealth squandered for the sake of allowing the overindulged few to
take that overindulgence to levels never seen and barely imagined
before in the very short run, as the common man works for his own
destruction, guided by the delusion that he will be one of the lucky
few, and so need not worry about the fate of the trampled upon many in
the brave new world he is helping to make through the aquiescence he
offers to what is becoming the status quo. One is reminded of the old
saying "those whom the gods would destroy, first they make blind".
It is madness.
Joseph Dunphy
accept as being necessary for the greater good, historically
inevitable, and ultimately desirable for all, this position being
defended in part with the glib claim that "it (the cost of labor) will
all balance out in the end". Where does such confidence come from?
Neoconservative political dogma, as I describe in the introduction to
the Halls of Eternal Disbelief
http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/trans.html
in combination with something that, as a teacher, I've been all too
familiar with for all too long. I'm reminded of the confrontations I
had with some of the undergrads I taught who would turn in answer sets
and exams with the right answers, but with work that was completely
wrong. We, as graders, weren't completely in the dark as to where
those mysteriously correct answers were coming from - the students
were resourceful when it came to cheating off of each other, and very
determined to uphold their imagined right to do so. I still remember
one frat boy in particular who, during a midterm, would loudly shuffle
his feet between one and four times every time he wrote down an
answer. The midterm was multiple choice and guess how many answers
each question had on it? Yet he grew quite angry when I told him to
stop doing that, and saw support in this from the instructor and his
fellow students. The prevailing view of what education was supposed to
be experienced a sea change from the time I began as a Freshman in
undergrad, myself, to when I completed my coursework in grad school,
the pursuit of understanding being replaced by an attempt to purchase
the credibility that previous generations had sought to earn. Our new
generation was actually angered by the suggestion that education
should involve taking the time to learn and understand the arguments
that lead to the conclusions; it simply wished to memorize and
regurgiate the "right" answers, an attitude that helped pave the way
for the simplemindedness of political correctness that followed in the
next few years.
The problem with the "wisdom through regurgitation" approach is that
an argument is only as relevant to reality as the assumptions
underlying it, and sometimes, in real life, the world changes and our
assumptions break down, leaving those who learn the answers without
the reasons without any idea as to how to adapt their ideas in light
of the new reality, or even the faintest notion that they might need
to do so.
Joseph Dunphy
demand argument for not placing price controls on commodities and
treat labor as a commodity - and let's ponder, some time, the thought
that somebody could take a look at that one, simplistic argument and
think that it would answer all questions for all time in a subject.
Common sense should tell one that the argument will break down very
easily when applied to labor. The unsold surplus grain feels no
despair on being left unsold, and would be unable to respond to such
despair even were it to feel such, but the unemployed laborer may very
well be starving, will certainly be conscious of his despair and fully
able to respond to it. The farmer, facing the bulk of unsold grain,
may put it in a silo or shrug off the loss greatly disappointed, but
he will not lose sleep and night thinking of how much of its life it
is missing out on, nor will the grain protest his callousness toward
its inanimate sorrows; the involuntarily idled laborer, on the other
hand, can not possibly be compensated for the loss of the years when
he is involuntarily idled, even if he should survive for unlike the
grain or machine parts or whatever else is being stockpiled, he must
consume in relative bulk in order to survive and remain part of the
supply, and he will very much care about whether or not he does so;
people are not commodities, and the supply of people will not, in
general, respond to supply and demand as if they were such.
Why not? In part, perhaps, because you won't see two unsold
carboretors getting bored while they've waiting to be sold, getting it
on and creating a small litter of little carboretors; human beings,
when idled and bored, often will tend to reproduce, with economically
perverse results. Let us consider the labor glut in a population so
increased as to lead to mass starvation. Were the standard supply-and-
demand curve argument from first year microeconomics to hold with the
universal inevitability that some want it to, applying to labor as if
it were a commodity, then as population went up, decreasing the market
value of the labor produced by population growth, the birthrate would
drop. Yet historically, this has not been the case. Why?
Joseph Dunphy
overpopulation has occured, social services have been absent for
obvious financial reasons - the government in such a state lacks the
funds to provide for all it would provide for, were it even to care
about its disadvantaged. Those who reach old age without living
offspring to provide for them in a country with nothing akin to social
security are condemned to starvation. To have offspring in abundance
is to have a better change at seeing more financial support when one
is too old to work, and the greater the abundance, the greater one's
own chances, as the one producing the offspring.
Here's where the perversity enters the picture: As the country becomes
more overpopulated and more impoverished, the earnings per citizen
will go down, resulting in the need for more surviving offspring to
provide for one's own retirement, and the death rate will go up (as
life becomes harder and medical care scarcer), resulting in a need to
have even more young offspring in the beginning, per needed surviving
adult offsping to be found at the end of one's own life. For a country
whose population has outstripped its ability to provide, precisely
when humanitarian concerns should lead one to wish for a decrease in
the birth rate, the population will soar instead, because the
individual's best interests and those of the society in which he
dwells will be radically at odds with each other.
What the population explosion is producing, at that point, is an
externality, and even in Microeconomics 100 one does learn that no
market remedy is to be found for those. But remembering that would
require that one stayed awake in class and, as I've noted, doing so
went out of fashion at about the same time that the frat houses went
back into style.
Joseph Dunphy
World; starving masses are to be found throughout, even in countries
that may seem underpopulated on paper, as is the case with most of the
nations of subsaharan Africa. A population of five million may seem
low, but for a low technology country, it may be rather high. Remember
that during the Middle Ages, when England enjoyed a higher level of
technology than many of the countries in question did prior to their
respective European conquests, London had only a few tens of thousands
of residents. What constitutes "overpopulation" is a product not only
of the land area and natural resources of a country - the immutable
realities nature gives it - but of its technology, of what the people
have the ability to do with what nature has given them.
But if the people, as individuals, are given strong disincentives that
persuade them to not develop the skills that allow them to develop and
sustain the technologies that make wealth possible through the
effective use of the resources nature gives them, what happens to the
effective carrying capacity of the land?
Joseph Dunphy
Quite obviously, it is going to be lower than it would otherwise have
been, producing starvation where there might have been plenty. But
this is exactly what is going to happen for reasons that should become
obvious, if one follows the notion of outsourcing to its logical
conclusion.
One outsources work to another country because, post exchange rate,
labor is cheaper there; one sees a bleeding of jobs, then, from hard
currency countries to soft currency countries. But what is going to
happen as work and relative prosperity come to a once low wage, soft
currency country? One need not guess, because it has already begun to
happen to places like Mexico. The currency of the country in question
will become harder, labor will not be as cheap after exchange rates
are factored in, and what outsourcing gave, outsourcing will take
away, most likely with disturbing speed. The Third World scientist or
engineer, who went through so much to become what he was, is rewarded
with a career that may be briefer than his time in school, and sooner
or later the kids in or approaching their time in the University will
notice this. From the start of undergrad to the end of a PhD program
is unlikely to be less than a decade; for whom is going through that
for a career that will last - maybe eight years at the outside - going
to be a good deal? Especially if globalization puts the lovable
companies we're already familiar with in the United States in charge
of a globalized economy, as those bangalored residents of Bangalore
now find themselves in the hopeless world of the overqualified,
refused even the low wage employment that will remain.
In the end, nobody will study these subjects anywhere, because one
will have to be insane to do so. Think of the condequences of creating
a world in which nobody understands any technical subject on a
professional level, because nobody will want to learn it on such a
level, or dare to. What does one get out of creating such a truly post-
technological world?
The question answers itself: a dark age. A global dark age, and that's
something more than a little bit different, because in every other
dark age man has seen, there has always been a place that was not
affected, a place where civilization lingered. Civilization never
really vanished, it just moved from place to place, but in this
scenario, it ends up falling everywhere, simultaneously. No place will
be left for civilization to spread out from.
I have argued, at the beginning of this string of posts, that
compassion for the unfortunates of the Third World does not mandate
outsourcing, globalization or open borders. Now we begin to see that
said consideration doesn't even allow these, because in the long run
they would serve to wipe out all hope for those these policies would
supposedly help, eventually even reducing the upper classes overly
well served in the beginning to a destitution they'll probably we
astonished by; to have everything in a world that has nothing is a
meager blessing.
Joseph Dunphy
Note: This thread is connected to this post:
http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/immigration-reform-redirection