US Job Creation Stalled By Automation and Our Immigration Overhang
06/04/2012
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See also: National Data | May Jobs: Adjusting For Immigration, Much Worse Than The Establishment (Liberal or “Conservative”) Admits, By Edwin Rubenstein

How many times do we have to hear the same message expressed, often with seeming dismay and surprise, before we understand that failure to address the obvious will produce the same results?

May’s weak job creation was reported by the New York Times under this headline: Feeble U.S. Job Growth Stokes Fears of Global Slowdown [by Shaila Dewan. June 1, 2012]

Ok, once more I will state the obvious: My recent VDARE.com piece, US Industry’s Automation Success Means Immigration Cuts More Than Ever Practical described strong research demonstrating the growing trend of US industry to automate.

The late economist Louis O. Kelso wrote extensively about what he dubbed binary economics: wealth is created by tools and humans, not simply labor. A persuasive argument for Kelso’s point: watch how tools do most of the work of people!

Look at this 46 minute film: Ultimate Factories: Coca-Cola, from NationalGeographic.com June 14th, 2011.

Turns out that this huge factory, which produces almost a million Coke servings a day, requires less than 10 employees. Yes, someone must design the process, but the automation that drives production demonstrates the inevitability of less and less labor to produce more and more of what we use.

So now US firms, and many even in historically cheap-labor nations, are finding it better to automate than to hire.

Which means that the expected bounce in employment will not, I predict, be happening—now or in the future.

Furthermore, the cheap-labor overhang of millions of unneeded aliens, allowed to enter legally and illegally into the USA since 1965, is just not needed.

We can’t turn back the clock on the follies of past decades. But, as the ancient adage goes, when one has dug one’s self into a (deep employment excess) hole, the obvious solution is: Stop digging!

Does this mean stopping  immigration? No—but hopefully useful immigration can occur more selectively, again driven by true employment needs.

When will businesses people who favor Open Borders realize they are really undermining the capacity of their customers to buy their products? When will those recent immigrants see that the siren song of the LULAC and La Raza people does the same to their job prospects?

The religious entities seeking more pew fillers will of course continue unabated.

Realistically, nothing will likely be done during the din of the current election. But recognizing the need for real reform of our mangled immigration system must eventually come regardless of who wins the White House and the Congress—since the jobs numbers are not going to improve much regardless of the crazed and utterly optimistic job creation promises of that practiced Bain job cutter; or his equally culpable administrative amnesty perpetrator, our current President.

Ultimately, it will all be decided by the growth of human numbers now already well beyond the limits of our planet.

Our generation leaves for our children, and for theirs, a heritage of uncertainty deeper than any other in human history.

Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC. , is Co Chair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). However, his views are his own.

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