Time for ideas as immigration turns toward occupation
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The cry of the Mexican government from President Vicente Fox down is that its citizens are flooding illegally into the United States because there are no jobs for them in Mexico.
Fine. We’ll grant them that.
But it is not fine pushing 12-20 million poor Mexicans and Salvadorans and Peruvians and Bolivians and Colombians and Hondurans and Guatemalans illegally into a nation that welcomes immigrants but does not welcome them in such numbers that immigration becomes occupation.
As our readers know, the Midlands Business Journal has a plan that will stop all that and help our industrial economy at the same time.
We want to take back industries that are lost to America forever – consumer goods, electronics products, some textiles and furniture – by building factories on the southern border inside the U.S. and staffing them mainly with Latino workers living in Mexico and commuting to work daily into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
When this writer formed it a decade ago, the lost industries take-back was the star in the crown. It still is, but recent events centered on some threatening illegal alien street theater have moved one of the plan’s key ideas forward.
That would be, first, to identify all Latino “illegals” working in jobs deemed by our government to be vital to the economic interests of the United States – farming, food processing, essential services – and giving these workers a tamper-proof card – orange, red, yellow, whatever, anything but green, thereby converting them from illegals to legals for some duration.
Then U.S. law enforcement tells the remaining non-essential illegals to, “Go immediately, upon pain of deportation with no hope of reentry for evaders, to your side of the U.S.-Mexican border. Apply for the jobs that will be opening up as factories are built. Your wages will be good, even outstanding, by the standards of your own country. You’ll get a free ride in a secure bus across the U.S.-Mexican border to work and a free secure bus ride home, every working day.”
Meantime, Congress and corporate America can start planning for land procurement, factory construction, equipment assembly, transportation infrastructure and administrative personnel needs for what will amount to a Marshall Plan for America 2006.
Leaders of construction firms such as the Omaha-based Peter Kiewit Sons Co. can pitch in the way Kiewit did leading up to Dec. 7, 1941,when Imperial Japan attempted its own version of illegal occupation . Kiewit was famed for building 1,540 barracks at the Fort Lewis, Wash., military facility in 90 days, because it had to be done.
Our plan from 1996 for confronting China has been followed very recently by another country so threatened. South Korea has built modern new factories inside South Korea and staffed them with North Korean workers bused across the border daily. The pay for the North Koreans is great judged by North Korean rates. It is, however, one-half of what a Chinese worker earns and one-tenth of the South Korean rate.
What we as a newspaper are trying to hammer home is that taking back lost industries in highly mechanized and technologically advanced new border plants, using Latino workers, will unleash an economic, social and morale miracle.
It will reverse the trade imbalance with China that our own Omaha wizard Warren Buffett periodically says cannot continue, but keeps getting worse.
It will reverse our industrial decline, first by producing countless lost consumer goods and eventually by jump starting feeder factories everywhere. New construction will be a big winner.
Trillions of dollars will be involved if this country can regain its consumer goods industrial base. That, in turn, will mean billions of dollars in tax revenues for governments. It will also return to our shores the manufacture of consumer products we will be only too glad to be making for ourselves in the event of worldwide social unrest or even war.
And it will stop our putting an increasingly menacing China on economic steroids making our products while we weaken industrially, lose blue collar jobs that someday are going to be sorely needed by generations of younger legal immigrants and add to our Welfare State obligations.
Having factories as a key place for employment of otherwise illegal aliens and as a funnel for some legal immigrants will stabilize our border with Mexico.
Having 1,500 miles of factory gates beats a wall anytime.
May, 2006
