Misplaced Fear
There’s a perception among many people in America — tending towards the nationalist end of the spectrum — that foreign-born people are flooding this country, making it less safe, and taking “our ” jobs. Donald Trump got elected on this fear, and now he’s following through on his campaign promises to slow immigration across the board.
I’ll leave the safety argument for another day, but let’s talk about jobs here.
100 years ago, almost every job in the world was location-dependent. You had to be in your field to farm it; in the factory to run it; in your office to take phone calls.
Today, we are finding an increasing number of creative ways to automate location-dependent jobs (eg: robots in factories, driverless cars, beefed up coffee vending machines) and make our remaining jobs more accessible across location boundaries (eg: telecommuting, telemedicine, online trading). This trend is completely irreversible at this point, and somehow I think the population of nationalists here in America must be missing it.
Say we fight to keep 100,000 factory jobs in America; we puff up profits for employers who stay here. In reality, this just raises the incentive for American companies to build more fully-automated workplaces which give them the right to say, “hey, we built in America!” while minimizing payroll. As a software developer, this isn’t necessarily bad for me, but I’m not the one who’s worried about having a job. It’s the blue collar workforce that we aren’t re-training or re-educating that is going to lose here. The people who bought into the “good, factory, union jobs are coming back,” lie are going to lose in the next decade.
I’m interested to hear what you have to say on this. What should we do if we’re worried about job loss? Should we even worry about it? What happens if we keep jobs here, but stymie innovation because of it?
