No, no, this type of protectionism is only truly a free trade restriction if exercised against Scotsmen. In all other instances, it is not a limitation of free trade and therefore won’t reduce American economic growth or living standards. 
When you’re trying to make ends meet you take what money is available for as long as you can. Is there any issue on which you don’t reflexively take the side of big business? I can’t recall a one.
There is no evidence of this cause and effect. It is most assuredly just scaremongering from corporations justifying enhancing profits at the expense of domestic employees.
Yes, and also we should couple a raise in the minimum wage with a law that allows labor an equal say in how a corporation runs.
Americans want to be paid 3-5x as much as foreigners without being 3-5x as good. Their delusions of grandeur will have to end sometime.
This applies at all levels, though. I’m sure these companies could get a competent foreign CEO for way less money. Ditto doctors and lawyers. Open 'em up to some real competition.
Seriously, I know you want this to be the normal partisan non-debate, but this is very well established. And, by the way, Obama knows this, and so do our senators. But openly acknowledging this truth is political suicide, and pandering to those in denial is a winning strategy. So they do the latter. I’m not trying to be snarky in saying this. If your objective is providing the greatest economic benefit to American in the aggregate, don’t buy the politicians’ nonsense. Free trade is the way to go.
I refuse to conflate free trade with importing foreign workers to replace domestic workers. I support free trade.
You can refuse it all you want, that notion has already been debunked in this very thread (e.g., post 40). Putting your fingers in your ears won’t changes facts. “I support free trade. Only I don’t consider that form of free trade to be free trade.” Uh, okay.
Would you be supportive of having these jobs handled by the same people, only working in their native countries? As far as the economic principles you’re refusing to accept go, why would that be different and acceptable?
ETA: Are you even willing to back off of your statement, “It is most assuredly just scaremongering from corporations justifying enhancing profits at the expense of domestic employees”?
I don’t support it, but there is nothing I can do about it. We can cap H-1B visas. Problem solved.
Then you don’t support free trade. But I expect you’ll maintain your strong attachment to the non sequitur you seem to hold so dear, so I won’t bother to restate what has already been offered to you multiple times in this thread. Believe whatever makes you feel better.
Yes i do. I support capitalism too, but I insist on regulations on industry for worker safety and consumer protection. That does not make me anti-capitalism. Free trade does not mean no regulation whatsoever.
Are foreign workers not worthy of a job?
It *does *mean no nationalist, protectionist regulations you dolt. National monopolies on employment were the norm before Adam Smith (and the physiocrats, and all those 18th century reformers) came up with the notion of free trade in the first place. It’s because it didn’t work that they pondered new ideas, for fuck’s sake ! It’s in the bloody name, too. Free trade means being *free *to ply one’s trade. Everywhere.
You can work in Asia. Asians can work here. It benefits both places.
I don’t see any reason that you can’t be pro free-trade on items but not on services. Or that they couldn’t exclude people from the items.
In fact, the latter is how every current country operates. They don’t allow just anyone to immigrate.
Read the article. Still pretty meh.
The last layoff my family weathered was a “you’re unemployed as of…riiiiight now” thing and came with a whole two weeks of severance pay.
These guys got three months notice and enough severance pay to make it worth talking about. Being laid off always sucks, but they didn’t have the rug pulled out from under them. They had more cushioning than the vast majority of workers can expect.
The HB1 visa holders are being paid at least. $60,000, which may not be a lot in IT but is hardly poverty wages.
Frankly, IT isn’t the rare skill that it used to be. Between the rise of IT in daily life and more off-the-shelf solutions, the inflated wages that characterize the IT industry are going to be harder and harder to justify.
Everyone else in the world is stepping up their game to stay globally competitive. I spend time in the Chinese education system, and while it’s far from a perfect system, those kids work HARD, and China is tripping over itself to transform their education system to exceed global standards. Same thing in India. Same thing basically everywhere.
If our only defense is to circle the wagons, it’s only going to take us further behind. We need to keep investing in our education system. We need to keep investing in world class research. We need to keep up. And we can’t expect to world to come to us on a plate simply because of our passport.
I am house shopping now, and the houses from the “new” suburbs of the 1950s are considered unliveable. The houses are around 800 square feet, with no central air and street parking only. Nobody builds a new home like that any more. And yet we all want to complain about housing prices.
How long can we expect more and more, without expecting to work harder and harder? I love America and want us to succeed, but protectionism is only going to get us so far.
I don’t think it’s “services” so much as “labor”. But I agree, I don’t see anything fundamentally incompatible about a government dropping tariffs on goods but still controlling immigration. Economists may say that the same rules apply in both cases, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do one without the other. And if you want to build a factory or office in a country, the employees will be those people who are allowed to live and work there.
I can certainly see why a company would want the best of all worlds, though. We want to build our factory in country A, where there’s good infrastructure, sell our product in country B without tariffs, where there’s a huge market, hire our workforce from country C, where wages are lowest, and have the regulations of country D, where there aren’t any.
Kobal2’s post about Disneyland Paris, and some of what I’ve heard about the Trans Pacific Partnership, make it sound like they’re achieving it.
As much as I believe in education, it doesn’t sound like that’s the problem here. There are educated American IT professionals who want to work at Disney. Educating more Americans for those jobs wouldn’t help; it’s Disney who doesn’t want them.
Or did you mean that they should become so much better at IT as to justify the extra cost of employing them, or educate themselves to a management track or a field where there isn’t foreign competition?
Any of the above, really. What are our competitive advantages? Americans are at a cultural advantage when it comes to management. We also have access to schools that teach super-specialized technical niches, and there are some opportunities there. And there is always the opportunity to become just that good.
With increased connectivity and prosperity in the world, it’s just going to get more and more competitive. Competitive people are going to have to think hard about what they can contribute, not just what they expect to get.
Don’t be silly. All other things being equal, Disney (and any employer) would jump at the chance to hire Americans rather than H1-B workers. H1-B workers require lots of administration and generally need training that Americans don’t. Presumably, the problem is that Disney can’t find Americans willing to do these jobs for $60K.
Of course we can. We can do anything we damn well please.
But that doesn’t change the fact that immigration control (and particularly immigration control enacted specifically to keep Zenargla’s jobs for Zenarglans) is not free trade. It’s the antithesis of free trade. It’s also factually a bad economic policy, and IMO a bad human rights policy.
I’d say the ratio far greater than 2:1. And it really doesn’t matter if your’re talking about IT or fruit picking. The problem isn’t that you can’t find enough laborers. The problem is that if you hire people who are actually here legally, you can’t get away with paying them $4 an hour.