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The Robber Barons a
century ago were willing to inflict the traumas of mass
immigration on American communities because of their insatiable desire
for cheaper unskilled labor. Jerry J. Jasinowski, the current president
of the National Association of Manufacturers, says responsible
businesses no longer need the hundreds of thousands of unskilled
workers that get into the country through family preference categories.
"Waves of unskilled immigrants may be dragging down the pay levels of
similarly unskilled Americans, but not at industry's behest,"
Jasinowski maintains.
What the titans of
industry crave today is skilled
foreign labor,
Jasinowski says.1
Business lobbyists argue that U.S. industries need at least 140,000
skilled workers from other countries each year to stay
competitive in the global economy, and thus to protect the
lower-skilled jobs for Americans. They indicate that there aren't
enough smart and trained Americans to do those 140,000 jobs.
Their claim seems
doubtful even for the short term, when one considers that the
United States has thousands of unemployed engineers, scientists,
computer programmers, and Ph.D. holders. And it certainly cannot be
true that in the long term a nation of 265 million people is incapable
of producing enough children with high enough intelligence to be
trained for the highest skilled jobs in this country. The
continuing arrival of skilled foreign workers "has coincided
with rising unemployment rates among young scientists and
engineers, and the forced retirement of some middle-aged American
workers in these fields," says David North, former assistant to a
Secretary of Labor.2
It is quite possible,
however, that in the large pools of unemployed skilled American workers
and professionals there are not people with the exact qualifications
for some of the 140,000 positions each year that are said to need
immigrants. But such a shortage need be only a very temporary one. As
Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has suggested, businesses
always can handle a worker shortage through a combination of raised
wages, more aggressive recruiting, and improved training for American
workers. Or, Reich says, businesses can choose what they usually see as
the cheaper option of importing foreign workers.
That is what
industrialists are lobbying Congress to allow them to continue to
do-take the cheaper option of importing foreign workers instead of
training and enticing Americans to fill the jobs. If there
indeed is a real shortage today, industries could end it in no
more than five years if they provided enough wage and workstyle
incentives, and if they aggressively recruited college students to
study for-or adult workers in other fields to retrain for-the jobs in
question.
Denying industries the
immigrant workers they desire should not be a punitive measure. It is
in the best interest of all Americans that our industries succeed-and,
for that matter, that entrepreneurs and the owners of capital earn
generous profits as they create jobs for the rest of us. The government
should provide the industries the means to meet short-term labor
emergencies, as long as they do not impede efforts to train Americans
to fill the needs later. Nearly all skilled-job vacancies for which an
American cannot be found should be filled by foreign workers given only
temporary work visas, not by immigrants allowed to enter the United
States for permanent residence. Senator Alan Simpson,
Representative Lamar Smith, and the bi-partisan Jordan
Commission all made useful proposals for charging businesses
high enough fees (thousands of dollars per imported worker) to
discourage them from bypassing American workers. The visas for skilled
workers should last only long enough-no more than three to five
years-for U.S. college students or experienced professionals to be
enticed to prepare for the job in question.
An allowance for five
thousand brilliant professionals would more than handle the number of
scientists, professors, computer whizzes, and so forth who possess
extraordinary genius and whom U.S. industries and universities
want to steal from other countries each year.
Any permanent admissions
of skilled immigrants above 5,000 appears to be against the
interests of American professionals. Joel B. Snyder, chairman
of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, says the
threats on the part of industry to move overseas if they can't import
foreign professionals should be understood as a kind of
blackmail: "In our view, such employers are not seeking a
technical workforce in the Third World. They want a high-tech
workforce in the United States that will accept Third World wages and
working conditions. That's no way to maintain and develop the
U.S. workforce that we need to continue to grow and prosper in the
twenty-first century.”3
Edith Holleman of the
AFL-CIO doubts industry truly needs even temporary skilled workers.
"The United States has the most fluid labor market in the world," she
says. If a company can't find a specific kind of engineer, for example,
other types of engineers usually can adapt to the task. Or if no
engineers are immediately available, a company can move lower tasks to
engineering technicians while parceling out the higher tasks to
professionals such as physicists and computer programmers.
Companies have endless ways to be creative in getting their tasks done,
and they would find a way to do so with Americans if Congress didn't
insist on providing them with foreign workers.4
If the labor law of
supply and demand is once again to work in favor of most Americans,
Congress should try to cut the number of workers entering the country
each year to as close to zero as possible.
Copyright
© 1996, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. Click
here to read the entire book by Roy Beck.
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