Well, well, well, folks from arguably the farthest left state in the union have taken to the streets to protest illegal immigration but do they know the full extent of what they are protesting?
If you are a small business operating in Massachusetts which requires a workforce with a large unskilled component you have a choice, hire illegal aliens and pay them less than the going wage for Americans or lose out to your competitors who are hiring illegal aliens and shrinking their payroll. Seen in this light, the businessman who breaks the law to stay in business is less unsympathetic than the unpatriotic profiteer he has been depicted to be.
Who then must we look to to stop this vicious cycle, this race to the bottom in which every businessman is driven to hire illegal aliens if he is to survive? Obviously, this calls for the intervention of government because capitalism really only works under the rule of law, it cannot compete successfully against the Mafia. That is why we have government to guarantee a civil society under the rule of law.
Let's look at this on a broader perspective. This businessman is much larger, he owns or manages a large manufacturing company with many thousands of employees but finds that his competitors are beating his prices because they have outsourced. This is not the dry-cleaning operation who hires illegal Hispanic women to move the clothes through the shop, this is a multinational operation in which American workers are competing with Mexican or Asian workers. The foreign workers are willing to work for a fifth or a 10th of the wage necessary to support an American worker.
The race to the bottom goes on, either this American businessman moves his plant offshore where he is not plagued by a host of often unfathomable and conflicting and certainly expensive regulations, one of the highest corporate taxes in the world, union problems, Obamacare, environmental regulations, or he continues to suffer competitive disadvantage which might even force him under. Under these circumstances a CEO who respects his shareholders and regards himself to be their fiduciary, must take his company offshore. If he does so, we call him greedy and unpatriotic.
The real villain in this piece is the liberal politician and those who support him for their own short-term advantage creating an environment in the United States which is so rigged against the businessman, large or small, that he has to either break the law or go offshore.
Nathan Bedford's second Maxim: failed socialism invariably begets more socialism rather than true reform.
These same politicians who create the environment driving business offshore or to illegal practices which inevitably drive down wages and even eliminate jobs now seek to compensate for these consequences with more social engineering. So we have inflated minimum-wage laws popping up. We have Obamacare or its equivalent in many states. We have proliferation of food stamps and many other nostrums which inevitably add more regulation and more tax and exacerbate the plight of our businessman.
By definition, a race to the bottom means there is a bottom and we will crash against it.
