"A HOUSE DIVIDED" - Pukin's FReeperversary Rant

It is getting somewhat strange around these parts when not only the President, but yesterday the First Lady was personally attacked by someone claiming to be a ‘Conservative’. Can there be any doubt that there are forces among us looking to drive a wedge between us?

A few weeks ago, this forum’s owner attempted to remind all of us of the big picture, that regardless of any personal animosity towards the President or Republican Party over their adherence to Conservative principles, that they are still a clear choice over the alternative Democrat Party rule. At that time, I assumed that FReeper-sanity had been restored, and that some of the negative rhetoric aimed at those in Washington D.C. would be dialed back.

Free Republic is a political forum with a proud history and vision, responsible for dragging Dan Rather from his post, and providing countless radio-talk shows with their daily talking points. FReepers are unique in their determination and energy towards protecting and defending the goals of our Founding Fathers.

We are also quite a powder keg of emotion and anticipation, expecting our Republican majorities to take advantage of this opportunity to make permanent gains in our Conservative agenda. Some might argue that this opportunity has been squandered, but those persons would be ignorant of history, lacking understanding that change cannot occur overnight in Washington, and that this is the way our Founders designed our Republic.

In frustration, impatience, and ignorance, we have allowed this forum to become a haven for those who do not share our Conservative goals. I do not blame our enemies anymore then I would blame a scorpion for stinging me. If anger and stupidity were one’s nature, I would expect the trolls that infect this forum to be angry and stupid consistently, which also makes them somewhat easy to detect.

The trolls are not the problem, though. The problem is that so many of us are allowing ourselves to be taken in by those who seek only to prevent us from going to the polls in November to keep their stinking hands off our government for another term. There can be no doubt, that no matter how disappointing our current government has been in promoting the Conservative agenda, that the alternative, enabled by our staying home will be MUCH worse.

The way to deal with Republicans who have actively worked against our goals is to defeat them in Primary elections. We do not even have to defeat them all, only enough of them to send the message that we will indeed target them if they work against our agenda. It should be the goal of EVERY conservative to see that Lincoln Chaffee is defeated in November. His seat is one we can afford to lose. Were I a Rhode Island resident, I would vote for the Democrat if only to send a message to Snowe, Hagel, Collins, Graham, and especially that bastard Specter that their primaries just got a lot tougher.

We only need to get one of them, and Chaffee is the one to get. It does not really matter if a Democrat takes his seat; he will be junior and mute as long as we maintain our overall majority in the Senate.

The one thing that bothers me here like nothing else, is the simple disrespect of the President. Am I am Bush-Bot? Damn straight I am. If you want to know why, click on my handle to read Southack’s excellent list of Bush’s accomplishments in office. But if Bush had done almost nothing in office, it would be no excuse for some of the slights and disrespect he has received from some of us on this forum.

Some of the things I have read here this past week match in tone what one can find on our favorite Democrat sewer site. Someone calling himself or herself a FReeper was promoting shooting aliens at the border until they stopped coming. Is that what we are about? Obviously not, and that so-called Conservative has been eliminated from this forum.

I think it is important to remember that you and I have just as much responsibility as George Bush does in changing our culture to better reflect Conservative values. Right now, this very moment, Conservatives have the government they deserve. We put them there. They are not our mommies and daddies sent out to bring home our Conservative bread. That responsibility lies with all of us. These Republicans represent us, they don’t serve us. Our job is to pick the best individual and send him/her to Washington in the hope that their CHARACTER will see them through.

This is why it is such a nutty thing to consider punishing the Republican party, when we should be letting them know that we’ve got their back, but if they cant do the job, we will replace them with ANOTHER Republican, instead of handing the reigns of government to the party of anger, hopelessness and despair. We sometimes like to think that those people we send to Washington are different from us, that they are capable of meeting our every need and desire.

I want every one of you to think about what you would consider to be your perfect mate. Maybe some of you think you have found that person. If you are married and totally in love with another person, that is great. Now I want to ask you to think about the last time that person you love, who is PERFECT for you, completely pissed you off. Remember, this is your perfect mate, your one true love. Do they do everything you want them to do? Obey your every desire? If you answer yes, I am going to put you on my troll list.

Those people in Washington do not even cut your lawn, yet you expect perfection. Get over it.

I am issuing a challenge to every person who considers him or her to be a Conservative; why don’t we all commit to a return to HONOR? Do we honor our Conservative agenda when we comport ourselves in disgraceful ways? Is it an honorable thing to suggest that our President is a moron, as I read here a few days ago? Is it honorable to attack Laura Bush or any other person representing true Conservative values?

Some of you might argue that George Bush is not representing Conservative values to your liking. I would remind you that the first thing Bush said upon taking office, is that he was going to be President of ALL the people, not just some. You know that if you followed Bush from the beginning that he campaigned of the very immigration platform he is defending right now. Did you vote for him? Yeah?

If you have ever had a steak at a Ruth’s Chris restaurant, you know that sometimes they bring that wonderful steak to your table with a sprig of parsley on it. I hate parsley. Hate it. If I were to treat my steak the way some of us want to treat our President, I would have to throw out the steak, due to that nasty parsley that comes with it. I can deal with the parsley to get the steak, and that is what I am asking FReepers to do.

Expecting perfection from any person, group or team is a recipe for disaster. George W. Bush is my president. You can disagree with him, you can blame him for your problems if that is your desire. If you disrespect his office, his service, his risking his life to be with our troops in Iraq, his steadfast desire to bring a new tone to Washington, or if you just like the way he keeps Democrats so pissed off they lose their minds on a regular basis, I ask you to treat him and his wife with respect and cut the personal attacks. If you call him ‘Shrub’ or ‘Jorge’ consider yourself my enemy.

Right now, our real enemy are the Main Stream Media, the Democrat Party, and all who follow and support them. If you want to jump-ugly on someone, why not start with those leaky bastards and give our side a break?

It is impossible to have a "Full Wall". There are locations that it can't be done mostly due to terrain. This is why contractor bids include both a physical barrier and virtual barriers. If you are waiting for a full wall to be built, then sorry we will miss seeing you at the polls - for decades to come.

read this story about the contractor bid.....

Seeking to Control Borders, Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors
New York Times 05/18/2006
Author: Eric Lipton
c. 2006 New York Times Company

WASHINGTON, May 17 -- The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan -- like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment -- the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders -- a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.

"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them -- all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors -- Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government -- is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border -- devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million -- is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators -- Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson -- are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

Of course it's not impossible to have a full wall. Look at the peaks and valleys that the Great Wall of China goes through! The mountainous area around El Paso is the only place where it's even dicey, and there, you can use the mountains themselves to do it.

Besides, the "impossible" quibble is being technocratic on a political issue.

It may be very difficult to actually build a sea-to-sea wall, when you get down to certain areas, but it most certainly is not impossible to PROMISE it, and put the principle in legislation, and start erecting it rapidly in all the rest of the areas.

It will take years to complete the whole thing, but in the process of building it we should get a very good idea of where the immigrant flows are moving as the wall are built.
If an immigrant can go through an area, then a wall can be built there. If terrain is so impossible that it's impassible, then it's a natural wall. And we'll see that as the regular wall is built.

There is no cost in agreeing in principle to a sea-to-sea wall, other than the EVENTUAL likelihood that you'll be pressed to complete it.

And truth is, by that point (6 or 7 years down the road) the presence of the wall already built will have done one of two things:
(1) Been very effective at cutting the flow to a trickle, which will make it very easy to persuade everybody who still worries about the border at that point that a "Virtual Fence" is sufficient, or
(2) Have channelled the whole huge flood of illegal immigration into those extremely remote places where it is difficult to build a wall, demonstrating why it is there, especially, above all, that a wall needs to be built.

Either way, the current political crisis will be averted, by letting BorderBots hear precisely what they want to hear (knowing full well that plans are modified in the out years) and keeping Congress.

What's hard about that?

The trouble is that by being excessively technocratic and telling a population that watched us land on the Moon that a wall "can't" be built somewhere in the desert, what BorderBots are hearing is that you don't really WANT to, and that you don't WANT to concede a real physical barrier, preferring a "virtual" barrier which doesn't actually block people...but which, rather, can be enforced or nor enforced based on the political climate of the moment.

That is precisely the opposite of what Border Conservatives want. You've got to bend on this. EVEN IF a wall is technically impossible along every inch of the border (it isn't), you concede the general point of building a wall the whole way, and start doing all the easy parts, and win the election THIS year. Then, 5 years down the road when you come to the El Paso mountains there won't even be a public debate when you "go virtual" because the physical wall is too hard. So long as that little gap of virtual fence does not become the hole in the dyke through which a million illegals pour, nobody is going to have a political hissy fit if the illegal immigration problem has been significantly reduced by the existing wall.

INSISTING on fighting over technical "impossibility" issues with Americans, now, in the heat of battle over the PRINCIPLE of a wall, might be completely sincere but politically flat footed. What it SOUNDS like, though, is the camel trying to stick its nose under the tent to get the PRINCIPLE of a "virtual wall" in place. BorderBots know that a "virtual" wall is a DISCRETIONARY wall, and they will think that you're trying to pretend to give them everything while giving them nothing.

It won't work politically.

Promise them a physical wall. And nobody will even notice in 5 years when you have to gap the really hard sections with a virtual fence, so long as it works. Do not waste political capital against a suspicious and hostile part of your base to try and give them an engineering lesson in the middle of a political battle. You'll just be shooting your own foot off.

You wrote: "I refer you to post #3516 as representative of the hurdles erected to reasoned debate over this issue"

From Post #3516: "Now answer me this Mr want to discuss, how do you replace the 12 million low wage workers once they are deported?? Since you and your gang have all the answers answer that one.
I have asked that questions 20 times and yet to get a realistic answer. So surprise me."

Well, dirtboy, here is how I would tackle that:

Right now the US legal workforce has a 4.8% overall unemployment rate, with unemployment much, much higher among the young and low-skilled. Illegal immigrants comprise 4.9% of the US workforce, and compete directly with low-skilled Americans for those jobs. The illegal is cheaper, because the employer does not have to pay him benefits (and doesn't have to worry about unionization or lawsuits or insurance). The illegal is even cheaper for employers who knowingly hire illegals, because they don't pay them minimum wage or pay the various employment taxes for them.

So, a substantial portion of the jobs currently held by illegal aliens will instead be taken by low-skilled Americans. Of course, Americans are more expensive, so employers will hire fewer of them to do the work. If there is a strong demand for work, the employers will simply charge their customers more money for their services, since the employers will pass along the cost of hiring American workers to the wider economy.

Yes, it is true, losing the availability of cheap, exploitable illegal labor will indeed cause a rise in prices for goods and services because legal Americans are more expensive to hire than illegals.

However, offsetting those rises in costs will be the dramatic diminution in the overall cost of welfare, prisons (between a fifth and a quarter of prisoners in the USA are illegal aliens), indigent medical services and education. As poor Americans go to work, the crime rates will drop and the costs of insurance will drop.

Also, incidently, as the job market for low-skilled Americans expands rapidly with the reduction of availability of illegals, the overall pressure for expanded welfare programs will drop. People will have jobs who currently do not. That changes the very fabric of society for the better.

There is a wage at which unemployed low-skilled Americans will work. It is above the wages paid to illegals, to be sure, but illegals' wages are so depressed precisely BECAUSE they are illegal. Employers do not in fact have the RIGHT to get labor that cheap.

So, the primary source to fill the gap left by the closing off of the border flow and steady enforcement of the laws against illegal labor will be unemployed low-skill American labor. It's out there.

And nobody is talking about preventing Latinos from immigrating at all. Once America is truly at full employment, and unemployed Americans find they can get jobs, to the extent that America needs more unskilled labor, immigration quotas can be raised around the world. There is no particular reason to favor Mexican labor above all, and indeed there are good reasons not to permit such a strong concentration of any particular sort of immigrants. There are plenty of unskilled Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Africans, Filipinos and Eastern Europeans, along with Latin Americans, who would jump at the chance to immigrate to the United States and augment the workforce here.

There is no good argument for letting Mexicans have the monopoly on the excess low-skilled job availability that the whole rest of the world would very much appreciate having. A multicultural America that has an English-speaking core and workers from 146 different nations around the globe is a more stable and less potentially unstable America than one that has an illegal labor force of 20 million people from one single bordering country, augmenting 30 million legal residents and citizens with ties to that country, all speaking one foreign language, and keenly aware that a third of their host country USED TO BE part of Mexico.

Unrestrained Mexican immigration is setting the United States up for a Quebec scenario in a way that 20 million immigrants divided between 140 nationalities would not do.

So, there's your answer.
The primary source of labor to fill the jobs illegals fill will be unemployed low-skill Americans - there are millions of them - augmented with immigrant laborer imported from all around the globe, not just Mexico.

This is the right way to do it for a lot of reasons.
It respects the rule of law.
It unburdens the social welfare state.
And it gives people from all nations a fair shot at the American dream, through legal channels, as opposed to just letting 15 million Mexicans hog the market illegally.

That's how I would answer, if I were you.

Guatemalans come thousands of miles to work in chicken factories. Americans from the inner city don't have as far to go, if the price were right and, of course, the incentives properly set (by making welfare payments contingent on taking such jobs, etc.).

And there are 2 million people in prison in the United States who most certainly could be...and should be...harnessed up to repetitive and agricultural labor.

However, I will grant you that both of those things are not terribly likely.

I will acknowledge that we need an immigrant labor pool.

But I submit that this immigrant labor pool should NOT be obtained through illegal immigration, because that creates a whole class of unprotected workers and a general lawlessness based on economic need.

I also submit that the immigrant labor pool should NOT be obtained through guest worker programs, because this competes unfairly with low-skilled Americans who are still in that sector, and is unfair to the workers themselves. Workers who come into America should be able to share in the American dream. Workers should be allowed to immigrate and be on the path to citizenship.

Finally, I submit that the American dream, for low-skilled, low-wage immigrants should by no means belong to Latinos. Mexico is close, and those workers are here illegally, but there are millions of Chinese, Indians and Eastern Europeans itching to come to America and do those same jobs Mexicans do. There is nothing wrong with Mexican labor and Latino labor, but right now it is probably 90-95% of the illegal workforce.

I don't really believe that the domestic unemployed work force and prison labor can't take up the slack, but assuming that getting that to happen is politically impossible, and that we really do need these 20 million workers, then a third of them should be Asians, a third of them European, and a third Latin Ameicans and Africans. And they should all be on the track for citizenship, if they eventually want it.

That recognizes work for what it is: noble and good for the country.
And it does not allow for one population to rush in, illegally, and on it's own geometrically-growing strength to become an ethnic threat to the egalitarian political balance of the nation. The low-skilled immigrant pool should be balanced from around the world through LEGAL immigration, and not simply handed over to Mexicans because of proximity and the willingness to break the law to get here.

There are deep political and cultural implications, not to mention the economic implications, of the Latino invasion. Even if I buy that many of these jobs cannot be held by Americans, or that businesses cannot afford to pay Americans salaries and have to have cheaper, more exploitable labor (a proposition I don't buy), this labor needs to be provided through controlled immigration balanced from around the world, not a Mexican bum's rush.

I will go on, because it is important.

You wrote this:

"Why doesn't your company raise the price of it's product 20% and increase it's margins? It can't because industry is always a slave to the market."

That is true, but it only works if there are substantial market players who are not playing by the rules. Gasoline companies have all hiked their prices to $3.00 a gallon, a previously unheard of number. How could they do that? Because the whole market moved. The cost of labor is an input to ALL comparable goods. Take chickens. Perdue and Tyson Foods compete. They use lots of cheap labor. It is true that if Tysons stopped using Mexicans and started using transported urban Americans, the costs would go up. If Perdue didn't, the 20% price differential would be felt.

However, if the national policy closes the borders and starts enforcing labor laws on the big employers, neither will be able to hire large numbers of illegals. Both will have to hire unemployed American labor, or legal immigrants, and the prices will go up in the entire sector. Americans will not stop eating chicken, so they will have to pay higher prices...unless, of course, they can get the product cheaper from somewhere else, which brings us to your next point:

"In a worldwide market many of those businesses would be closing their doors or like many, move to other countries where labor is cheaper. Labor intensive industry requires low wage laborers."

There are many aspects to this issue.
One is: if the American labor pool is not there to operate chicken factories in the US, rather than breaking the law and IMPORTING workers into the US, with all of the problems that causes, why not simply ship that industry to Mexico? The headquarters will remain here, but the industry itself will be abroad. The American labor force is not sufficiently large to be able to legally provide the work, so offshore that industry, and you won't be putting AMERICANS out of work, will you? You'll be putting illegal alien Mexicans out of work.

Ah, but offshoring to low wage areas has its own problems, doesn't it? China is certainly low wages, but whatever you build in China, if it is successful, will be stolen or substantially impaired by the Chinese government. One of the reasons companies remain in America is because of the stability of law which does not exist elsewhere. The higher prices they pay for remaining in the USA are, partly, the payment of a "governmental insurance premium" - that's simply the cost of living in a place with a developed infrastructure where your factory won't be stolen by corruption as soon as it turns a profit. Some businesses will take the chance overseas, and some will profit, but others will discover that the extra margin they make on cheap labor is completely devoured, and then some, by the corruption and pilferage of local government.
Anywhere that has a really robust rule of law and property rights is a more expensive place to operate, and for that reason. And businesses, by paying more, are paying a premium for their security. Most think it's worth it.

The bigger picture is that keeping a factory open in the United States which has to rely exclusively upon imported labor to operate, because there is no available labor pool in the US to do it, is very expensive for America. You are not producing many American jobs, but you are imposing a heavy burden of social expenditures, not to mention crime and other problem, because poor immigrants have lives outside of work, and families, and poor areas have the greatest social problem. Now, businesses that operate what amounts to large workhouses for foreigners on American soil inflict substantial costs on communities and the country at large through all of these social costs, but they free ride. The taxpayers bear the burden disproportionately while the company reaps the profit AND gets the benefit of the strong protections of American labor law.

Bottom line: if there aren't enough American workers to man these labor-intensive workhouses, what benefit is it to have them in the United States at all? They SHOULD be abroad, so that the social problems and heavy social expenses of the American welfare, health and education structure as applied to these workers' families is not borne by the US taxpayer.

However, as I mentioned in my last post, I think there ARE enough American workers to do these jobs, and so then we come to a different matter: shifting employment offshore that Americans would do, while there is substantial unemployment in America, because cheaper labor can be found offshore. Right now, the tax code allows companies to deduct the costs of labor, including offshore labor. And so (assuming I am right that there ARE adequate American laborers to do these jobs, provided they are properly paid) the American taxpayer is literally subsidizing, through the tax code, the shipping offshore of US jobs. I think that has to stop. Offshore labor can be cheaper. But is it cheaper than American labor if you cannot deduct the cost of such foreign labor from your income tax? Probably not.

Now, in theory, the companies themselves could ENTIRELY move offshore, so that Tyson Foods could not just send its chicken factories to Indonesia, but move it's whole corporate offices out of the United States to.
But that absolutely will not happen.

It will not happen because the skilled labor, executives, etc., will not go. Indonesians can be found to sex and slaughter chickens, but they cannot be found to operate Tysons foods corporate. Americans will not move en masse to the jungles of Indonesia, or to Mexico, or to China, or anywhere except, perhaps, Europe (where, however, costs are higher than the US) in order to run a chicken company. Without the high-skilled labor, the company will collapse abroad, and whatever company set itself up in the US in its place would get all the skilled labor.

You can offshore piecework, but you can't, yet, offshore the white collar work to anywhere that it's less expensive.

That too may be changing, however. India speaks English and has the common law. There is no reason why all legal work other than local litigation could not be offshored to law mills in India, and why all of the management of major companies could not be done in India, using Indians.

Of course were legal work, for example, to even start to be offshored, massive legal impediments would be raised to it by law. Start to really have a free market where SKILLED foreign labor can put the FRONT office out of work - because Indian executives and lawyers are as well, or better, educated and talented and aggressive as American execs, but a lot cheaper - and suddenly "reasonable" legislation will appear that makes an exception to THAT sort of offshoring.

The global market is regulated, and taxed, and tax codes and regulations, in addition to labor and resource costs, drive it. I think that the difference between our viewpoint may come down to a matter of FACT: whether or not there is adequate legal labor in America that can do the jobs that illegals do.

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