U.S. border factories the answer to Pacific Rim,
illegal immigration and China’s military threat
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The illegal immigration problems continue.
China is taking over as manufacturer to the world and is becoming an ever-quirkier military danger to the United States.
Nobody seems to have answers.
So, with our readers’ permission, the Midlands Business Journal will recycle our solution first proposed ten years ago.
What to do?
• Demand from a clueless Congress a new federal act designed to take back lost U.S. industries and jobs.
• Build state of the art factories in enterprise zones along the U.S. side of the Mexican border in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, staffing them with lost-cost Latino labor.
• Bus the laborers daily in secure transportation from their homes in Mexico to the jobs and back again at the end of the shifts, exactly what the South Koreans are doing busing North Koreans into their factories, to stop China’s 1.2 billion coolie labor force from wiping out entire industries.
• Pay the labor what would be a good wage for similar same work done in Mexico.
• Promote the plan as a way to citizenship for good work and to make the border a magnet for law-abiding Latinos.
• Start with a pilot group of factories, taking back simple goods such as shoes and pots and pans. Then add hundreds and then thousands of plants, going after everything the Pacific Rim has taken from us: consumer and industrial electronics, clothing, furniture, industrial equipment of all kinds, industrial textiles and other industries and jobs too varied to list here.
Who wins?
• America as a free and self-sustaining nation recaptures industries that should never have left. We get our morale back!
• The construction industry gets to erect the plants and the equipment manufacturers get to fill them with machines.
• Governments at all levels reap more taxes when trillions of dollars worth of goods are again made in U.S. factories.
• The U.S. national defense effort, in the event of a major war with, say, China can at least manufacture on our soil what it takes – right down to uniforms, soap and toilet paper.
• The American justice system 10 to 20 years out will have a much easier time of it when second and third generation Latinos are ready for jobs. The oncoming generations will have better choices with factory jobs available to them, far better than flipping burgers or doing stoop labor in the fields. Some Muslim kids in France, under similar circumstances, are burning cars.
• American ingenuity is a major winner. The Wright Brothers didn’t build an airplane nor Henry Ford a car nor Thomas Edison a light bulb without the background of tinkering around machinery.
• Mexico gains. Mexican leaders argue that illegal immigration is the only way to relieve the pressure of Mexican citizens needing good jobs. The good jobs by Mexican standards now would be at the border, only a bus ride away. Besides helping themselves, Latinos would be helping America in an ordered way, rather than with the current idea – which more resembles occupation than immigration.
• U.S. immigration policy wins as the border factories hum. There is no justification, humanitarian or otherwise, for our federal government allowing illegal immigrants to pour across the border in search of income. The income would be right there – apply!
• Illegal immigrants already working in the United States in agriculture, entertainment, construction or other essential industries can be assessed for guest workers status based on U.S. national needs. Others can be directed to the Mexican side of the border or permanently deported for non-compliance
• The U.S. trade deficit is said by Omaha’s financial oracle Warren Buffett to be unsustainable at the current multi-billions of dollars level yearly. Some of this deficit goes to buy back the goods we once made here.
• Labor unions gain jobs for their members in construction and in follow-on industries, when lost industries are taken back. This alone makes the plan well worth labor’s support. The labor movement has no reason to be defensive. It doesn’t have those jobs now, so what’s to lose?
• The enterprise zones at the border can be authorized for other states. Workers who prove themselves at the border could move on to other states under special authorization, to be replaced by new candidates at the border.
Who loses:
• China mainly. The Chinese are currently opening one new coal-fired plant per week, due to heavy demand by Americans for consumer products and by the Chinese themselves for consumer and military goods. Strange gambits by the Chinese communist military are growing more overt. It makes no more sense for Americans to help build China industrially – and at our own expense – as we helped build Japan before World War II. Prophets at the time said the steel and iron we were shipping to the Japanese in the late 1930s would come back as bombs and bullets – and they were right.
This writer’s plan is not an assault on global free trade. We are not advocating tariffs.
We’re simply proposing doing legally for regaining American jobs in industry what we have been doing, sometimes illegally, for jobs in American agriculture, construction and entertainment – finding the best way to team Latino labor with Yankee know-how and the U.S. economy.
April, 2007
