OPINION

Are we a nation of immigrants or emigrants?

by Mario Delgado

The Nation is running in the opposite direction to where it needs to be heading. It must immediately revise its limits on the number of employment visas it issues annually and expedite their processing so as to effectively expand the size of its labor pool. The economy needs to embrace immigrants (skilled and un-skilled) from anywhere in the world willing and able to be combined with its existing stock of productive resources. It must promote and support full fluidity if it is to survive in the global economy it has helped create and is now in.

The issue is not that there is no job that Americans (natives) will not do; the real issue is that there will be no jobs that Americans will not have to do after our economy loses the desirable ones from being unable to compete globally. We need all the low cost and productive labor we can get. We need them to compete against foreign industries that are fully modernized, extremely productive, with access to competitively priced financial capital and paying average wages of less than $1/hour. Modern communication and transportation to markets are cheap enough not to erase productivity/cost gains from such labor advantages.

Does anyone believe for an instant that any business or industry facing unfavorable cost conditions will not outsource their operations to a country with a more profitable mix and fit of resources to include labor? Ours already are and will continue doing so until we, as a nation, objectively and purposefully correct our immigration-labor policies. With the insurmountable labor cost disadvantage we face and remarkable production modernization achieved by many of our global competitors, it may already be too late to preserve the domestic location of many of our industries.

The problem the economy faces is a structural problem engendered by short sighted political decisions. The allocation of visas changed for the first time since colonial days, from primarily industrial/sector (economic) needs, to family re-unification (social) priorities in 1965. No amount of amnesties will resolve the fundamental supply/demand-for-labor imbalances across markets being created by the inadequacy of the above change in policy. As always, politicians create and ignore the problems they foster until they explode, and then place the blame somewhere else. In this case, they are placing the blame on the entities that saved the day, the businesses and labor that followed the economic and not the political accommodations of the time.

In a global economy like the one we are facing and encouraging, the solution will be found in pushing the envelope in the other direction. We need as a nation to make labor as abundant and fluid as capital, technology and products by facilitating its flow worldwide. We also need to offset the impact on domestic labor by making its job placement/relocation and education/skills retraining more agile. Anything less than this degree of adaptability is illogical and will pit mobile labor against the immobile variety across borders worldwide. Unfortunately, most people dislike forced relocation and retraining, especially the inhabitants from settled, modernized economies accustomed to having an economic upper-hand.

No doubt, if we allow labor to become perfectly mobile across our borders, the average wage level in many of our industries will decline, but so will the prices of many products leaving the purchasing power and real wages of labor intact if not better. On the other hand, if politicians decide to protect, even partially, the wage levels, some industries will continue departing our territory and/or outsourcing while others will develop labor-saving-productivityÐenhancing technology in an attempt to maintain their cost per unit of output globally competitive.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the technological answer, as historically has been the case, will give added momentum for industry to automate even more rapidly and worldwide. This survival response will impact labor again by increasing its available supply even faster, and pushing the need for more drastic labor relocation and retraining than otherwise.

Like it or not, and barring closing our doors to globalization, we must respond economically and not politically to the growing competitive menace from Asia, including China, India and, perhaps, Russia. A full economic integration between all of the Americas should be an appropriate starting point, while designing a national relocation and retraining program, a logical companion.

After all is said and done the real choice we face as a nation is the following: "Do we want to remain a nation of immigrants or are we ready to become one of emigrants?"


Mario E. Delago
P.O. Box 907953
Gainesville, GA 30501