The challenge for Congress is to understand that we must use immigrant labor in the national interest, but only in the national interest, especially in agriculture and basic services. Of equal importance to America long-term is to confront China by recapturing lost industries by building factories on our side of the southern border and staffing them with commuting foreign nationals.
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The United States is on a collision course with China for the championship of the world.
Unfortunately, every area in which we grow weaker – from industrial plant and job losses to trade imbalances to software piracy – strengthens them.
Few in Congress seem to sense danger. Two generations of Baby Boomers are on average so ignorant of history they haven’t a clue of how great empires fall, more often quickly than slowly.
Think about what is happening.
China is building its industrial base with the apparent end-game of manufacturing most of the world’s consumer goods.
They seem to know that prosperity for a billion-plus population is going to rest on industrial underpinnings and that this will require tens of thousands of factories and hundreds of millions of jobs.
In education, China is placing a priority on the essentials of industrial leadership, which is to say, on mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering. Ethnic studies, women’s studies and feel good courses, so dear to our current affluent and easy-living society, have no place in bustling China.
Being practical, communist Chinese leaders have tweaked Karl Marx to avoid the pitfalls that brought down the old Soviet Union. Entrepreneurs and free enterprise have the green light for full speed ahead; nonsense in the direction of the welfare state is stopped cold. The emerging conventional wisdom is that China’s ruling elite views the world as engineers would, because most of them are engineers; our leaders think like lawyers because most of them are lawyers.
As a generally homogeneous population, the Chinese automatically enjoy that once great American national strength builder, “E pluribus unum – from many, one.” This writer imagines that the word “multi-culturalism,” reeking as it does of Balkans chaos, has never made it into a Chinese dictionary.
All the space allotted for this editorial could be filled with why the Chinese are going to beat us unless we snap out of it.
They’re the leader with 74 percent in a recent poll quoted on Fox News Channel and elsewhere for nations supporting free global trade. Why wouldn’t they support it; they’re winning and the gap is widening.
The Chinese are among the planet’s great adapters. Pirating intellectual property is indigenous, and it is virtually impossible to stop them from stealing any idea of ours that they want or even slow the thievery.
We can win by realizing, among other things, that we must retake lost industries. That can be done, as we have written in these pages before, by building modern, highly mechanized and technically advanced factories in an Enterprise Zone on our side of the southern border and staffing them with foreign factory workers bused daily from Mexico and earning Mexican wages. South Korea is doing that very thing, using North Korean workers in South Korean border factories, to fend off the relentless Chinese.
The emerging debate on illegal immigrants is making clear that Congress must create a special class of “guest worker” deemed to be in the national interest, topped by those who are helping keep us the world leader in agriculture. Such “guests” are also vital in our restaurant and hotel industries.
Wherever such illegal workers are found employed inside the United States, if their work is deemed vital to the United States, they should be given a one-time opportunity to tell the truth about their background and given an “orange card.” If they lie, they should be summarily deported. Also, they should be limited on how much they can drain their local U.S. communities by exporting large amounts of their money to Mexico or other homelands.
Telling the truth about minor crimes or how they got into the U.S. should not necessarily send a needed illegal alien packing. But lying must be grounds for deportation.
Any illegals already inside this country who are not deemed to be essential to our national purposes should be sent home or invited to return to northern Mexico and apply for a commuter American factory job in the Enterprise Zone.
As noted in our earlier editorials, building the factories that would be required to retake all the industries otherwise permanently lost to China and the Pacific Rim nations would spark a multibillion-dollar construction boom. The eventual trillions of dollars in revenues from regaining manufacturing of clothing, furniture, textile and electronics items would fatten tax bases at all levels of government. It would spread a new era of prosperity over America.
The United States cannot fend off the Chinese unless we keep our present manufacturing base in sophisticated industries such as aircraft manufacturing and computer software and win back what we have lost in the making of all the items listed above and others.
Congress needs to look down the road. There are millions of immigrants now. In future generations there will be tens of millions. Some will climb to higher jobs levels, as have past generations of the Irish, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians and others.
But the jobs have to be there, as they were for the millions that moved through Ellis Island, El Paso and San Francisco in bygone times.
We must have something for the common people, jobs between rocket science and picking fruit. That means industrial jobs. Otherwise, what lies ahead is social disintegration in the French manner or even worse, revolution.
Much is made of the mutual reliance upon each other of China and the United States. Essential Chinese factories and jobs wouldn’t be there without the U.S. consumer market. China offers us the luxury of lower prices. In exchange, they get our factories.
This writer’s main question is:
When China takes almost every industrial job we have, when they have pirated all the intellectual property they want, when their own 1.3 billion people are enough of a market for their factories, why are they going to need us?
That is the benign part. The scary side comes if China decides to turn militarily aggressive or for some other reason turns off the consumer goods spigot. Right now, we’re not even making our own shoes, uniforms or toilet paper.
April, 2006
MBJ Publications Inc. • 1324 S. 119th St. • Omaha, NE 68144 • Phone: (402) 330-1760 • Fax: (402) 758-9315
