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He is talking about the manufacturing worker-bees who need better technical skills and instead have a bad high school diploma and possibly even worthless college experience. What they lack is marketable SKILLS.

Yeah, I imagine Dubya must be so clueless that he believes Mexican and Chinese peons have greater skills than the American Middle Class.
Ol' Juanterm better change his tune if he wants to maintain support of his conservative base.
He's not gonna achieve that by joining Charlie Rangel and the "Blame America First" crowd.

I have worked with many Mexican and Asian "peons" as you call them and if it is manual labor you want performed, they are your top choice, for sure. They will work endlessly, for peanuts, and be happy for the opportunity.

And these "peons" can be trained to operate sophisticated computerized machinery (you have heard of sophisticated comouterized machinery, haven't you?) that is meant to be operated by "peons" by the machinery manufacturers. This was done because most manufacturing jobs are performed by UNSKILLED workers.

"Peons" are dime-a-dozen, and interchangable. If you are instead looking for a more valuable employee who can suggest improvements, program the machines, fine-tune the process... then you have a winner.

BTW, automation is just getting more prevalent. One machine can do the work of ten operators (think tractor/combine). Should we ban automation?