01/24/2012
By Paul Nachman, my fellow VDARE.com contributor, has thoughtfully brought to my attention the Jan/Feb 2012 Atlantic Magazine article, Making It in America, by Adam Davidson.
This article offers us superb reporting on the nuances of manufacturing and employment in America. And it supports the point of my last VDARE.com piece US Industry’s Automation Success Means Immigration Cuts More than Ever Practical — that rapid automation gives US businesses strong reasons not to insist on the massive importation of legal and illegal immigrants.
This and other recent MSM articles make my argument even stronger.
Immigration patriots must put this argument before corporate America.
The Atlantic article’s author, Adam Davidson, deftly tells the personal stories of who, in the emerging young labor force, will find longer-term employment — and who will not.
Most poignantly, he makes us look at a 22-year old manufacturing employee, an unwed South Carolina mother, Maddie, who is eager, bright, hopeful — and yet endangered by the future foreign competition. Lest we assume Maddie is employed by a heartless, faceless corporate monster, Davidson tells us her employer’s CEO, artfully limned as entirely human, compassionate, and competent, has been forced constantly to assess the off-shoring option in order to avoid bankruptcy — a condition which Standard Motor Products, a middle-sized aftermarket parts manufacturer and distributor, has faced a number of times.
Davidson then gives us the story of another Standard worker: Luke. His tenure might last for his entire career, because he has acquired special skills. The firm’s high tech machines require him to be constantly alert to subtle changes to save incorrect machining of sensitive auto replacement parts.
Too bad that Atlantic’s Davidson, after setting up the clash between current reality and the immigration crisis, doesn’t call for patriotic immigration reform.
Silicon Valley has become obsessed with green-carding all foreign STEM graduates, but this has not caused it to stop its unnatural alliance with the Roman Catholic Church and the ethnic lobbies like LULAC and La Raza.
Powerful CEO voices such as that of the late Steve Jobs constantly claim that they must go overseas to manufacture such ubiquitous products as Apple’s iPhone. (See How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times, January 21, 2012)
But even if this were true — Davidson’s Atlantic article suggests it is not — it should not be the basis for intellectually lazy policies like flooding America with broom sweepers and agricultural crop pickers who will be future drags on our general welfare.
The main points that patriotic immigration reformers need to stress:
My suggestion: a group of immigration reform patriots should gather to produce a “CEO Education Initiative” — which would produce a program composed of the most telling, honest and accurate reasons for changing CEO attitudes.
Collins, [email him], a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., is CoChair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). However, his views are his own.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.