"Amazing how you are so willing to close entire industries rather than hire cheap labor. Your premise is right though, either we react and compete with the rest of the world and it's labor advantages or let our labor intensive industry go overseas. That is the basis of the World Economy whether or not we like it or not.
Why do you care about the mix? If we have all Asians who cares as long as we get the job done. The fact is the Turd world is right across the Rio. Using this labor only makes sense because we are overqualified for most of these jobs.
You also say that Americans are willing to pay more for American workers. Tell that to Ford and GM or walk through your house and see how much say made in China."
All of your points deserve a response.
First, I am not willing to close entire industries, because I believe that relatively cheap American labor, and more efficient management practices, and automation, all three are available to allow industries to maintain themselves in America just fine. I AM unwilling to allow ILLEGALLY cheap labor to exist in America. Our laws set a minimum standard of pay, benefits, rights and protections for everybody working in the United States. I do not believe that employers should have any way to get around those labor minima, certainly not by illegally hiring illegal immigrants. They are making an excess margin of profit from hiring illegal labor. This is illegal profit. I am not willing to allow business to make illegal profits by illegal means in America. I believe that the general protections of American labor are not optional to businesses operating in America.
I also believe that American businesses, if they cannot get dirt cheap illegal labor and maintain profits illegaly, CAN adapt and retool to earn their their profits legally: by hiring unemployed Americans, by automating more, by becoming more efficient.
I will go further. It is IMPOSSIBLE for American labor to compete, dollar for dollar, with foreign slave labor, such as employed in China. American standards of living cannot be maintained on slave labor wages. I do not think that chasing industries out of the country, nor that allowing industries to pay illegal wages in America is the answer. Nor do I think that companies should be given tax deductions for going abroad and putting Americans out of work. The correct solution, in my view, is to enforce the immigration and labor laws of the United States, and modify the tax code to remove tax deductibility for business shipping labor offshore. To the extent necessary, imports from nations with substandard wages and living conditions, with which American labor cannot possibly compete, should have corrective tarriffs imposed on them to balance out the labor cost advantage of slavery and use of peones in dirt poverty gives to manufacturers using such labor.
This differs from protective tarriffs. Protective tarriffs are simply used to protect American manufacturers, and are set to make American products artificially more competitive. The only people who profit from them are manufacturers and businesses, who have no incentive to become more efficient or produce better products.
Equalization tarriffs are fundamentally different. They account for the reality of higher costs of living in the First World versus the cost of peones and slaves. The benefits from a regime that balances out the higher cost of Western labor is immediately felt across the whole economy, because higher employment is maintained. The "World Economy" is not a government. The United States CANNOT export at will into ANY other country. Where the lines are drawn by every country are based on fundamental national interests. It is in the national interest of the United States to maintain its laws and its labor standards. And law is properly used to erect barriers to prevent goods made by foreign slaves from competing with goods made by free Americans. Chinese slaves are cheaper, but we should impose tarriffs on those goods to balance out the cost of labor advantage. No free people can ever compete with slave labor. We are the linchpin of the world economy, and we can indeed enforce our laws, including our labor laws, and we can indeed erect a tax regime that does not allow a race to the bottom of labor protection to triumph.
Why do I care about the mix? Because national security is at stake. Massive Mexican immigration is building a Latino Quebec situation which will end up destroying the political stability and ultimately threaten the territorial integrity of the United States if it is allowed to go unchecked. Immigration is good, but it certainly should be coming in from the whole world, and not be heavily overrepresented by illegal border jumpers from Mexico.
I have no problem with using immigrant labor. If we want to allow a million immigrants into the country a year, from China, Mexico and elsewhere, to do the low-skilled jobs, that's fine. But they have to pay social security, and be entitled to social security benefits when they retire. They have to be resident immigrants with a path to citizenship. They have to be paid at least minimum wage, and be fully protected by the Workmen's Compensation Regime and labor laws. And they have to have the same access to courts to sue employers for abusive labor practice, and to unionize if they want to, as any other American worker. I am willing to allow massive immigration of cheap labor into America, but it has to be legal, and every one of them has to have the full protections and rights of the entirety of American labor law. It is a matter the integrity of the system of law that American business cannot be permitted to operate little islands of Third World labor outside of the reach of the regular laws that apply to every worker in America. There is one law, and it applies to everyone. We can have them here under those conditions. Or we can't have them here at all.
I did not say that Americans are WILLING to pay more for American workers. What I said was that Americans will HAVE to if the tax and tarriff regimes are arranged so as to make it such that Chinese slave labor cannot be used to simply club our manufacturing economy into submission. They have an advantage, yes. Slavery and mass poverty do indeed provide a competitive advantage in terms of cost of labor which the first world can never match economically. But we can use the law to equalize that equation and protect American employment. And we should.