Making illegal immigrants want to retreat to the border
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Congress seems to have a problem getting some or all or any of the 12
million immigrants now in America illegally to head for home.
So why not try a different approach?
Make illegal immigrants not needed in our national interest want to retreat
to the border by putting manufacturing jobs there.
This would be accomplished by building factories on the U.S. side of the
border and offering jobs to skilled Latinos willing to commute daily in
secure transportation from northern Mexico.
But not just any jobs. The jobs would be in industries lost to America over
a decade or more to low-wage foreign countries.
The plan is one this newspaper has been talking about for 11 years and needs
repeating.
The idea teams Yankee know-how with Latino labor, just the way it’s done in
agriculture.
It would help solve a second problem Congress has been inept dealing with –
stemming the tide of an estimated 1.8 million U.S. jobs lost mainly to China
since 2001 and more before that.
Americans have no obligation to prop up China with jobs, especially since we
are on the way toward needing mid-level jobs for our own people and for a
tide of future immigration.
Taking back lost industries is a good start in the direction of filling in a
no-man’s land of employment between high skill, high education positions on
one end and burger flipping and stoop labor on the other.
Building factories in a vast enterprise zone along the U.S.-Mexican border
can get America back in the game. It needs to be making electronic products,
consumer goods, clothing, furniture, textiles, and thousands of other items
that once under-pinned American society.
Why should manufacturers have to close U.S. factories or have their products
made in Mexico or Pacific Rim countries when a plant in El Paso, Texas, or
San Diego would keep jobs, sales and tax revenues at home.
South Korea has done its version of the same thing, busing North Korean
workers daily to South Korean plants. And with the same imperative – keeping
at bay a China whose low cost labor force is capable of taking every
manufacturing job in South Korea.
Border factories in a free enterprise zone will spark a boom that even a
super-computer would have trouble tracking for economic benefits.
Building thousands of factories and filling them with state of the art
equipment is going to make corporate America a lot of money and put a lot
more in workers’ pockets. New roads will be required, new railroad links
needed. There eventually will be billions in new taxes paid to local, state
and the federal governments, in wages paid to both Latino and American labor
to benefit them and their local economies, and in sales revenues for small
and large businesses.
Lest unions feel left out, their leaders should remember that what would be
built are products that are lost. More than just Latino labor will be
needed. There will be union jobs to be had and feeder industries springing
up all over the country.
The plan would build the factories on the U.S. side of the long border in
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The workers being bused would be
paid good wages by Mexican standards.
Hard-working Mexicans and others would have the opportunity to phase into
America in an orderly way. Eventually the path to citizenship would open.
Benefits from the resources of the enterprise zone should go proportionately
to all the states, not merely to the four states directly involved.
June, 2007
