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In reality, outsourcing has created more, better-paying jobs here.

What a farcical piece of drivel.

Totally blows off the economic fact of the manufacturing multiplier-effect. Which dwarfs the "service industry" multiplier. What is more consequential is that there are other, vastly more sinister effects which these kinds of propagandists as this one try to overlook, pretend are irrelevant or denigrate.

The fact is when ITT, ILLEGALLY shipped the U.S. defense-contract business of building the highly sensitive "Night Vision" technology out of the country, nominally to be built in Singapore...they were actually transferring the technology and production straight to China.

U.S. Attorney John Brownlee

"There was a lot of illegal activity going on here,'' said John Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke. ``The true nature of the harm, you might not figure out until you're on the battlefield.''"

And ITT, knowing all this...they SHUT DOWN THE U.S. production of these key components they outsourced to the PRC.

As reported accurately in the Washington Post at the time...we no longer manufacture those components...and China "has it all".

And they did this all just three months into 2001...three months into this White House's "watch"...after obviously being given the green light to pack it in as a true U.S. manufacturer of our defense needs.

As a consequence of this MINDLESS "outsourcing"...

Assistant Attorney General Wainstein said, “The sensitive night vision systems produced by ITT Corporation are critical to U.S. war-fighting capability and are sought by our enemies and allies alike. ITT’s exportation of this sensitive technology to China and other nations jeopardized our national security and the safety of our military men and women on the battlefield.

The HB-1 visa program is just another scam to exploit. Prof. Borjas has done some good work on falling wages.

A snip from his blog:

Almost everybody knows that in the past 40 years, the real wages and job prospects for low-skilled men, especially low-skilled minority workers, have fallen. And there is evidence –– although no consensus –– that a rising tide of immigration is partly to blame. Now, a new NBER study suggests that immigration has more far-reaching consequences than merely depressing wages and lowering employment rates of low-skilled African-American males: its effects also appear to push some would-be workers into crime and, later, into prison.....The authors are careful to point out that even without increased immigration, most of the fall in employment and increase in jailed black men would have happened anyway. Nevertheless, the racially disproportionate effects of immigration on employment are striking.

http://borjas.typepad.com/the_borjas_blog/2007/05/blacks_and_immi.html

Totally blows off the economic fact of the manufacturing multiplier-effect.

You also have to consider domestic 'outsourcing'. I happened to have spent the last 37 years at a US company that always shows under an SIC codes as part of the manufacturing sector.

There is no doubt that technology changes over those decades has changed the business, and there is also no doubt that automation has decreased the number of direct manufacturing workers in that particular business.

But a factor that is often overlooked is domestic outsourcing. For instance, 30 years ago, one individual plant that I am familiar with had probably a dozen or more employees working in the reproduction department with old style multilith printing presses and various binding operations for project documentation and training manuals. They had another dozen typesetters who worked on old IBM selectrics or Viewgraph machines for preparing the text. They had a couple of commercial artists and technical illustrators and a full time photographer to produce the graphics or slide presentations and other assorted communications. All of those people counted as "manufacturing employees" because that is what the company's SIC code said. I don't think it's necessary to elaborate what the advent of the PC and Microsoft Office did with those jobs but basically, they were outsourced to Silicone Vally. But when those jobs went away, the IT department began growing, and the IT jobs were better paying.

Add to those changes, a move to out source plant services. Cleaning staff, security guards, cafeteria workers, and in the case of this particular site, even payroll and benefits management -- were outsourced to speciality companies. They are now working as contractors for that company, but through a supplier and no longer on that company's payroll, and yes, the place has lost probably 20-30% of the company employees that it had 30 years ago. But in the end, it is providing employment to the same number of people but many of them now show up on government statistics as "Service Employees" instead of "Manufacturing Employees."

You have to be careful with the statistics. They can be very misleading. That particular business has more than tripled it's sales and revenue even accounting for inflation over those decades, has a payroll that is far higher in real dollars than it was 30 years ago, yet has far fewer "direct" employees who show up in the Government statistics as "manufacturing sector".