I have a lot of problems with what I see as this vastly over-simplified description of how American economics and market places work, just as I have done since Trump started campaigning way back when.
There are lots of errors and holes, but I’ll start with a big, but subtle and so far entirely ignored one: the things that American businesses did back in the 1980’s, as stop-gap measures to cope with their short-sightedness in the decades before that, are still causing huge problems for us today.
The way I see it, in the period from about 1955, to about 1975 or so, American Education was left pretty much as it had been, in the decades before. It was left that way, and not upgraded, because the relative explosion of high paying high school diploma based jobs in the years after World War 2, seemed to make upgrades in education unnecessary. So politicians short changed schools and education in order to keep state taxes down. No one noticed that the rest of the world, and Japan and Europe especially, were passing America by in educating their workforce.
As the need for more education showed up, American businesses, still flush with high profits from the overall lack of world competition after WW2, spent their own money to train their workers as needed, to perform the tasks required.
But in the late 1970’s, it began to become clear that foreign competition was not only for real, it was both cheaper and better than US production in many areas. Among the first cheap quick fix American businesses went for, was to stop spending part of their profits on training, and switch to hiring only experienced pre-trained workers, from other countries if necessary. That problem has STILL not been correctly addressed, since it is STILL not possible for someone with a High School education to get a middle-class lifestyle paying job.
The reason why Trumps idea to throttle the sources of cheap foreign workers wont do the trick is, that they STILL haven’t fixed the education part of the situation, and even worse, everyone is still completely ignoring the fact that businesses can no longer afford to pay wages at a rate that allows workers to live in the same area where the business’ markets are.
During the 1980’s, wages were cut all over the country, but the cost of housing and food and other basics remained at the high level they reached before the competition from overseas kicked in.
Top that off, with the common standard economic models that American and most foreign businesses operate under, and there still isn’t any way for businesses TO increase wages significantly.
Wages were reduced (where the wages themselves weren’t reduced, they were effectively cut, by eliminating paid benefits) as a quick-fix to the need to rapidly increase productivity in the face of competition. That was about when the cost of Medical insurance began to show up as a big political issue, notice. That mistake has yet to be rectified, which can only be accomplished by finding a way to drive down the cost of living proportionately.
Cutting off access to cheap foreign labor wont do anything to resolve those issues, it will just cause businesses to look for ways to get around the limits (such as demanding more exceptions to the limits of importing foreign workers for specific training needs), or to shift even MORE industry overseas where the workers can ALREADY afford to pay for their housing (such as it is).
