I believe you are wrong to assert that the people you excoriate are anti-immigrant. I think that is a straw man when what we are against is illegal immigrants and the idea we cannot police our borders. Our present administration's self-inflicted disaster is because they are indifferent to the question of illegal immigration and had no clue the messaging they are sending or are cynically exploiting the issue. Additionally,The dramatic rise in the low incomeSalaries in the last three years or so Can be directly attributed the slowdown in illegal immigration, a case study in the effects of policy.
Most of the time when I hear "they think we shouldn't be able to police our borders," it sounds a bit like a strawman as well. I blame the media diet for this kind of language though, not you. It plays well to an interested audience.
Just like referring to anything occurring at the moment as a "self-inflicted disaster." That sort of language is great for the press, but poisonous to reasonable discussion. A disaster is a deadly weather event, or a major transportation accident, perhaps war refuges stuck in camps and ignored to deadly effect.
Human migration has been occurring as long as humans have been. Calling anything on our borders a "disaster" is Russell conjugation.
The problem with Dr. Zubrin’s analysis is that he’s not looking at the issue in context. If it were a stand alone proposition he would have some good points but it’s not a stand alone proposition.
The immigration debate has to be considered as just one element of a larger discussion about the policies neoliberals in both political parties (including the establishment GOP) have embraced since the end of the Cold War.
The first thing that the elite hacks who have been calling the political shots for decades did was embrace unrestricted free trade as if it was received truth. It encouraged labor arbitrage that resulted in the deindustrialization of our nation’s heartland. Millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared and all that was left for the disposed workers was the opportunity to flip hamburgers in fast food joints.
The second thing the newly empowered members of the clerisy did was adopt a reverence for credentialism. The willingness to work hard or even demonstrate innate intelligence was subordinated to the importance of having a degree. Guess what, most Americans don’t have a college degree.
Let’s look at just one example; for most of American history journalism was a working class profession. Reporters were mostly cigar chewing working stiffs who were as comfortable in a pool hall as a newsroom. Over time, these jobs were no longer available without a college education and now for many outlets a graduate degree is required. Has the quality of journalism improved? For the answer, take a look at what’s happening at the New York Times.
Throughout most of the post war years, house painters, plumbers assistants and roofers were able to make a decent living. So decent in fact, that they could afford to send their kids to college and actually pay for it. Not any more.
Those construction jobs are now held mostly be immigrants (illegal and legal) who are willing and able to work for far less. The American roofers and house painters thrown out of work had their lives ruined. You know who benefited? The upper middle class who got to pay a little less to get their lawn cut or their homes remodeled. The idea that immigrants are merely filling agricultural jobs that Americans don’t want simply isn’t the whole story, Dr. Zubrin.
The author mentions that he was a delegate to a GOP state convention during the Reagan years. The establishment GOP was remarkably anti-trade Union. I’m old enough to remember the impact that Reagan’s dismissal of PATCO members had on the labor movement. The old establishment GOP that Dr. Zubrin wants to resurrect, desired nothing more than to emasculate the working class.
It’s not just the working class. How often do we read reports of Americans being fired and replaced by immigrants on H1-B visas? It seems to happen all the time. For elites in both political parties it’s a double whammy. American workers are replaced by those willing to earn less and for the immigrants, the H1-B program is a form of indentured servitude. For the Nancy Pelosi’s and Mitt Romney’s of the world that makes it “Miller-Time.”
Dr. Zubrin is right about one thing; American physicians make way too much; nothing contributes to our outrageous healthcare costs more than that. What he’s wrong about is that it’s our immigration policies are mostly to blame. The real culprit is the licensure requirements. The medical-industrial complex makes it virtually impossible for middle-aged or older foreign physicians to practice in the United States; this isn’t accidental; it’s deliberate. It’s just another example of the American clerisy protecting its own. The working class is expendable. The professionals, who our friends and neighbors; not so much.
Why stop at letting physicians into the country to reduce healthcare costs? Why not try the same thing with college professors? After all, the incredibly inflated costs of an elite college education are driven primarily by the sky high salaries of full time faculty. Rarely do these faculty members (at least at elite institutions) teach more than two courses a semester (that’s six hours a week). The rest of the time, they’re supposedly doing research. Outside of the sciences, this research is mostly (not entirely) unadulterated you know what.
How much could we reduce tuition if we replaced 25 percent of university faculty with foreign professors who would work for less and teach twice as many hours?
No one loved open borders more than woke university faculty. How much do you suppose they will like it if it was their jobs being lost instead of the job of some roofer in Ohio?
Dr. Zubrin, you have it exactly backward. It’s not that the GOP needs to abandon Trumpism; it’s that the Democratic Party needs to reacquaint itself with its inner-Trump.
The Democrats used to be the Party of working people. Democrats now despise working people with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Why do Democrats hate the working class? It’s simple; the Party is now in bed with the Clerisy which worships at the wokest of woke altars.
As for the establishment GOP; the guardians of the ideology that you want to reestablish, Dr Zubrin, it’s always hated working people. There’s no reason to think that will change any time soon.
I get it, many cosmopolitan globalists are so dainty of disposition that they got the vapors every time Trump said something rude or nasty. And to be fair, many of the things Trump said about immigrants were repugnant and wrong.
But the debate about about immigration is far more nuanced than you presented, Dr. Zubrin.
Let me ask you one last question; I’m sure there were many immigrants at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere who worked on the Mars lander. How many undocumented immigrants do you suppose worked there?
If JPL wouldn’t hire undocumented immigrants why is it right that you and I can hire them to cut our lawns?
I'm not sure I understand the point about university faculty: A great number *are* replaced by foreign students who work for less. Foreign graduate students do an enormous amount of the teaching at most universities, particularly in STEM. Students complain endlessly about their bad English: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/education/unclear-on-american-campus-what-the-foreign-teacher-said.html. The insanity of this scheme is that having given these people the best education in the world, we promptly kick them out when they graduate. We send them, usually, back to the Pacific Rim, where they found startups using the intellectual capital they acquired in the US. The venture capital follows, and then they pay taxes to other countries, not us. It's an absurdly self-defeating policy.
My point is that the same logic that Dr. Zubrin wants to apply to physicians also applies to tenure track faculty. He suggests that encouraging foreign physicians to practice in the United States might significantly lower health care costs; he’s right about that. U.S health care costs are driven in large part by physician salaries. His idea is a great one with the caveat that once you let them in you have to create a regulatory environment that permits them to work. Those regulations are set by the states, not the federal government.
Higher education in the United States is as bloated and expensive as health care. A major driver of these costs is the compensation paid to tenure track faculty who, for the most part, simply don’t work that hard (outside of the sciences).
Much of the teaching is done by graduate students who are often foreign and adjuncts who earn next to nothing.
In the meantime, the overpaid and underworked faculty typically teach 3-6 hours a week often teaching courses they’ve taught scores of times and don’t need to prepare for. Add in a few hours a week to meet with students and the pedagogical efforts of professors at elite universities typically comes to less than ten hours a week. At these institutions the more senior you are, the less work you do. Full professors teach less than assistant professors. It’s these overpaid faculty members who drive tuition costs sky high not the measly wages of graduate students and adjuncts.
At the most prestigious institutions, average salaries for full professors are well into the six figures; it’s a great gig if you can get it. Who wouldn’t want to be highly compensated for thinking great thoughts in between latte runs to Starbucks?
Point out to faculty that they are overpaid and underworked and they quickly tell you about how much effort they put into their research. Outside of the sciences while some of this research is valuable, most of it is junk. This “research” mostly ends up in obscure journals which are filled with poorly written paper that no one reads and influences nothing.
Tenured faculty have it even better; they hardly have to work at all and they can’t be fired (though these days telling an joke with a sexual innuendo is often enough to negate tenure).
Dr. Zubrin is right; we could lower medical costs by importing foreign doctors who are happy to work for less to compete with American doctors.
How do we know? Well, after all, it worked for roofers and house painters. We let immigrants with those skills come in and it drove the Americans who once held those jobs to distraction and despair. Often we drove them (and their children) to divorce and opioid addiction.
Why not reduce college costs the same way. Dr. Zubrin wants to lower medical costs vLet’s eliminate tenure, fire 25 percent of the professoriate and replace these faculty members with immigrants willing to earn less and teach more? Harvard, Yale and Princeton could set up recruiting stations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Claire, maybe you could recommend some Turkish faculty anxious to escape Erdogan’s clutches and who are willing to work for bargain basement prices.
The bigger point is that American elites are enamored of immigration only because they’ve set up a system where the American working class pays the price while upper middle class people are not impacted at all. Do you suppose college faculty (the most pro-immigration cohort in the United States) would be as enamored of the idea if it was their jobs being threatened?
This all has nothing to do with capitalism or market economics and everything to do with hatred. The modern American clerisy hates working people and has disdain for the less educated. Our rulers in times past (the industrial elite) at least had a sense of noblesse oblige. Our current rulers are unrelentingly selfish, narcissistic and gluttonous.
Dr. Zubrin points out that our economy is not a zero sum game; he’s right. On the whole, immigration creates more jobs than it destroys. That’s small comfort to the roofer who’s job was taken by an immigrant willing to work for half the salary and now faces the prospect of supporting his family on a hamburger-flippers wages. It only makes it worse when that now unemployed roofer hears a lazy, hypocritical college professor criticize him and his neighbors for being religion-clinging, gun-slinging bigots.
Unless we find a way to create opportunity for workers who will never be college educated, we may soon find that we don’t have a country left.
Come to think of it, aren’t most of the problems our nation faces, including the immigration imbroglio, caused by hyper-educated and remarkably well-credentialed nincompoops?
Are you being facetious? Because your proposal genuinely sounds reasonable to me. I'm fully on board with replacing overpaid, underperforming college faculty with hardworking immigrants.
You agree that on the whole, immigration creates more jobs than it destroys. Does this lead you to favor more immigration? Or do you think that certain categories of people--roofers, for example--need to be protected, at all costs, at the expense of everyone else? If so, why?
I agree that we need to protect people whose jobs disappear (because of immigration or technological change) if they're too old to acquire new skills. I don't think we should protect them, though, by banning immigration and technological change. We'd still be weaving textiles by hand if we thought that way. (And our population would still be 2.5 million people, as it was at our Founding.) The aim of our economic policies should be "giving rise to a large, flourishing, prosperous middle class," not protecting any given industry or demographic group.
As for the charge that "The modern American clerisy hates working people and has disdain for the less educated," do you mean academics? Or anyone whose income is above X? How high is X, do you think?
I’m certainly not being facetious. I’m suggesting that it’s hard to create a rational system of immigration without simultaneously constructing a rational trade policy and also considering other factors like the worship of credentialism. These factors consort with each other to put the working class through the wringer. Each reduces employment opportunities for people without a university degree.
I believe that immigration is a net positive for the United States and that the fearlessness, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to work hard of immigrants makes our country far stronger.
But I also believe that the immigration system we have now, which insures that it’s only Americans without college degrees who have to compete with immigrants willing to work for slave wages, is profoundly unfair.
These less educated Americans are already seeing jobs they once were eligible for disappear because of the heinous rise of credentialism. To make matters worse, they are the prime victims of labor arbitrage.
I would like to see much more immigration from people poised to compete with highly educated Americans for jobs; then we would see how genuine the sympathy for immigrants amongst the upper middle classes really is.
As for a rational trade policy, your analogy to the situation with Thatcher and the miners doesn’t apply here.
In the United States, the energy sector is highly competitive and employed tens of thousands of non-college educated Americans in high paying jobs. This sector thrived under Trump but the writing is on the wall with Biden (see the Keystone Pipeline). American environmental policy is yet another example of the livelihood of working class Americans being sacrificed while the upper-middle classes prattle on blissfully disinterested in what’s happening to their fellow citizens.
I think that you’re also wrong to pose the issue of trade as a zero sum competition between protectionism and free trade. If we want to support immigration, we need to be sensitive to the employment prospects of native born Americans. There are plenty of capitalist countries that have balanced capitalism with a mercantilistic patina. Germany, South Korea and Japan come to mind. So does the faux-communist People's Republic of China. None of these nations are sacrificing innovation on the altar of protectionism. They are simply finding a middle ground (something Trump started and Biden seems to be continuing.)
Then there’s the issue of legal versus illegal immigration that Dr. Zubrin didn’t even touch on. News reports from the southern border, if they are to be believed, suggest that Biden’s policies are proving to be a disaster. Of course, that’s from my perspective. Given that a substantial number of left-wing democrats believe that the mere concept of borders is inherently racist, for them, the current policies are a feature not a bug.
Also, given the intersectionalist orientation of intellectual elites in the Democratic Party, these cadres believe that poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants are simply more important to protect than native-born Americans. In fact, they believe that these native-born Americans who’s lives are being destroyed are getting exactly what they deserve. As unemployable and opioid-addled as they may be, to the Democratic-left, these folks are the oppressors.
Perhaps you don’t get CNN or MSNBC in Paris, Claire. If you did, you would know that large swaths of the journalistic class, the punditocracy and the intellectual yet idiot class that populates American higher education truly has disdain for the American working class. Given the role that these “intellectuals” play in our “deep state” this is very sad.
Yes, in fact, these people are haters. Who do they hate?
Perhaps you should re-read my comments WigWam where I indicate that there is little evidence in Massachusetts at least that illegal immigrants have taken jobs away in the construction trades. In fact it is generally known at least in the Boston area that there is a shortage of workers in the construction trades.
However, I will cede one point to you when I lived in Florida for a short time I do definitely believe there was an extensive population of construction workers who were undocumented. Right next to where I lived there was a new housing development being built by KB Homes where a parade of the most broken down vans with blown out windows covered by trash bags would show up every morning with what I suspected at the time to be very poorly paid undocumented workers. I will make two observations however about Florida. Which presidential candidate did Florida overwhelmingly vote for in the last Presidential election and which party affiliation is the current governor of Florida Gov. De Santis? Second which among us me and you WigWam, left Florida to move back to Massachusetts shortly after encountering seeing a broken down van with trash bags for windows showing up next door every morning or is now moving to Florida from New York City because a couple of packages from Amazon got stolen from the lobby of their apartment building.
First WigWam de-industrialization started at least in some parts of the US a long long time ago long before the era of post 1945 mass immigration and free trade. For example if you go to the mill towns of New England de-industrialization starts at least as far back as 100 years ago but because at that point the jobs where moving to other parts of the US no one outside of New England cared about de-industrialization. MIT moved from Boston to what commonly called CambridgePort(now known as Kendall Square) in 1916 as in part as it was an industrial area that even in 1916 was falling on hard times and where MIT could buy abandoned factory land quite cheaply. For a long time time long before Kendall Square became the hub of biotechnology it was the hub of candy manufacturing in the US and in fact Junior Mints are still made by Tootsie Rolls Candy co. kitty corner across the street from the Moderna HQ in a last remaining outpost of confectionary. But back in those days autoworkers say in the "heartland" Detroit suburbs living high on the hog of their UAW contracts had little sympathy for the plight of New England.
I have linked to this video a couple of times on Twitter just to show for example how back in 1968 supposedly the golden era of the American middle class and American economy just how run down the cities of Boston and it's waterfront was.
So the analogy I would use is if people in the industrial heartland didn't that much when Boston was down and out which should people in Boston care when the Midwest industrial heartland is now done and out.
Another point which I will have to follow up in a future comment is at least in the Boston area, perhaps it is different in NYC people in the construction trade do very very well. Like making well over $100,000 a year well if not in some cases $200,000 a year well. Additionally I doubt you well find many undocumented workers at the many large scaled construction sites were work is currently underway in Boston or Cambridge. I personally even from a residential homeowners perspective I don't believe I have ever hired anyone who is an illegal immigrant and in general just from the prices they charged me personally and my knowledge of the economy plumbers, electricians, and carpenters in Massachusetts even those who specialize in residential instead of commercial and institutional do very very well financially.
Yes, this is correct. American manufacturing peaked in 1920; a small, upward tick in manufacturing, mid-century, is attributable to the Second World War. The 20th century saw the complete transformation of the American labor force: At the beginning of the century, Americans were chiefly employed in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors; we're now almost entirely employed in the service sector. This pattern of economic development is seen everywhere. The exception is South Korea, where manufacturing has stabilized at around 40 percent of GDP since the early 1990s--but South Korea was a largely agrarian country only 50 years ago, before it began an extremely rapid industrialization process. Some developing countries skip right over manufacturing and go straight from agriculture to services. The switch to a primarily service-based economy is the definition of economic development; trying to prevent this from happening is nuts; it amounts to deliberately keeping your economy undeveloped as an unskilled-workers job creation scheme. It makes much more sense to focus on transforming unskilled workers into skilled ones. Yes, "learn to code" is byword for "out-of-touch policy proposal," but ultimately it isn't wrong. Yes, for many workers, it's impossible: They're too old to learn. But this is, ultimately, what has to happen to our displaced manufacturing labor force: retraining for high-skilled jobs. We can't artificially keep factories open as a form of social engineering. This is exactly the battle Thatcher fought (and won): She refused to keep the coal mines open after they ceased to be economically viable. She was right to insist upon this. There was no way for the UK to continue to compete on coal; economies have to mature and change. You're right that I embrace "unrestricted free trade as if it was received truth." The alternative to free trade is a planned economy--some form of socialism, communism, or fascism, in other words--and the evidence against planned economies is in. They don't work.
I *do* think the complaint that those of us who embrace free trade have been insensate to the human costs of capitalism is correct. The social dislocation that have accompanied this shift (from agriculture to manufacturing to services) has been enormous, and we haven't done enough to cushion those most affected. But keeping factories that aren't competitive open artificially isn't the solution. That's the federal job guarantee that AOC favors. Many on the right grasp that this is a bad idea when AOC proposes it, but they don't seem to grasp why it's a bad idea when Tucker Carlson proposes roughly the same thing. Robert is right to say that the difference between AOC's socialism and Tucker Carlson's is a heaping dose of nationalism. The difference between the Trump GOP and AOC isn't their economic vision. It's where they come down in the culture war.
I do think Robert's kidding himself if he thinks the GOP is about to see the light and embrace economic freedom and immigration. The GOP is *only* about the culture war now (and fundraising). People like Robert--and me, for that matter--will find it easier to push the Democrats to the sensible center than to bring the GOP back from looney-world. The only thing that will achieve that, I suspect, is repeated defeat.
I do think there is and was a more left-leaning alternative to what Thatcher did with the UK coal miners that should be given more consideration which is what Mitterand did with French coal miners in the mid-1980s which was like Thatcher to acknowledge coal mining in France was a dead industry that govt needed to shut down but Mitterand also gave very generous severance payments for life to those coal workers who were above the age to be able to retrain for another career.
Now there significant differences between the shutdown of the coal mines in France vs those in Britain even though it was occurring at the same time. First, the coal miners in France did not have the same political muscle and militancy as those in the UK and the industry as a whole was smaller than in the UK. I also think the mine shutdowns in France were sold as a consequence of the shift to nuclear power and one of technological change instead of an economic change. Furthermore, the high likelihood of coal mining being discontinued in France was obvious going all the way back to the Messmer plan under George Pompidou in 1974. Perhaps even earlier as one could say nuclear energy for power generation was a logical next step for France as a historically energy insecure nation after DeGaulle's atomic bomb program in the 1960s.
Britain after Thatcher closed the mines did continue to burn lots of coal but it was cheaper imported coal which I think is still is justifiable but one that does seem on the surface to be harsher than Mitterand's justification which was simply France no longer had a need to burn coal now having nuclear power. I will also add there were some in Britain who were intrigued with going down the French path of massive nuclear power such as Thatcher's intraparty nemesis Michael Heseltine but she rejected the high costs of French style nuclear buildout in part by Britain's possession of North Sea Oil and Gas which was coming online right at this time.
One reason why I sometimes give Claire a hard time about her book is I think there is this narrative of Britain especially post Thatcher of being the buccaneering free-market paradise with Mitterand's France of being slow, hidebound, and sclerotic and the problem is I just don't think this is so clear cut when you look at the facts on the ground.
Another interesting story is the Thatcher-Mitterand partnership on the Channel Tunnel and why both supported the project for their own vastly different reasons(Mitterand for his part wanted the tunnel as a way of shifting the redundant workforce of SNCF to a new business line without actually laying off large numbers of unionized railroad workers). In effect, Mitterand knew SNCF had way too many workers for the amount of passenger and cargo it carried but if you built the Channel Tunnel you would create a whole new market for rail service where one previously did not exist and thus shift over this excess workforce at SNCF to serve this new rail line i.e. Eurostar/Eurotunnel without laying people off. Thatcher, of course, had no interest in this what you might call "creative" labor policy instead she wanted to prove the tunnel as a piece of major infrastructure could be built with solely private capital.
I will also add that more than just there a lot of immigrants at JPL I believe the current director of JPL is an immigrant or at least the one immediately preceding was. Actually there are a ton of immigrants in the space program and BTW there were a ton even back in the golden era of the 1960s(i.e. all the German engineers from operation Paper Clip). In fact it has long been a given the US would have never made it to the Moon without immigrants even back in the golden era of the 1960s.
Saying I am sure there were a lot of immigrants who worked on the Mars lander at JPL is an understatement. There would NOT be any Mars lander without immigrants.
As to your point about University faculty I would say immigrants are represented quite well among faculty members although probably less so in some areas of law and political science(which is probably relevant to your point). However, my personal opinion is in areas of law and political science you start getting closer to the political system and anti-immigrant sentiment on both sides. I will say if you are a foreign born professor in law or political science in the US I do think there is an expectation be very patriotic and always assume the American way is the best way from both the right and the left.
I believe you are wrong to assert that the people you excoriate are anti-immigrant. I think that is a straw man when what we are against is illegal immigrants and the idea we cannot police our borders. Our present administration's self-inflicted disaster is because they are indifferent to the question of illegal immigration and had no clue the messaging they are sending or are cynically exploiting the issue. Additionally,The dramatic rise in the low incomeSalaries in the last three years or so Can be directly attributed the slowdown in illegal immigration, a case study in the effects of policy.
Most of the time when I hear "they think we shouldn't be able to police our borders," it sounds a bit like a strawman as well. I blame the media diet for this kind of language though, not you. It plays well to an interested audience.
Just like referring to anything occurring at the moment as a "self-inflicted disaster." That sort of language is great for the press, but poisonous to reasonable discussion. A disaster is a deadly weather event, or a major transportation accident, perhaps war refuges stuck in camps and ignored to deadly effect.
Human migration has been occurring as long as humans have been. Calling anything on our borders a "disaster" is Russell conjugation.
The problem with Dr. Zubrin’s analysis is that he’s not looking at the issue in context. If it were a stand alone proposition he would have some good points but it’s not a stand alone proposition.
The immigration debate has to be considered as just one element of a larger discussion about the policies neoliberals in both political parties (including the establishment GOP) have embraced since the end of the Cold War.
The first thing that the elite hacks who have been calling the political shots for decades did was embrace unrestricted free trade as if it was received truth. It encouraged labor arbitrage that resulted in the deindustrialization of our nation’s heartland. Millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared and all that was left for the disposed workers was the opportunity to flip hamburgers in fast food joints.
The second thing the newly empowered members of the clerisy did was adopt a reverence for credentialism. The willingness to work hard or even demonstrate innate intelligence was subordinated to the importance of having a degree. Guess what, most Americans don’t have a college degree.
Let’s look at just one example; for most of American history journalism was a working class profession. Reporters were mostly cigar chewing working stiffs who were as comfortable in a pool hall as a newsroom. Over time, these jobs were no longer available without a college education and now for many outlets a graduate degree is required. Has the quality of journalism improved? For the answer, take a look at what’s happening at the New York Times.
Throughout most of the post war years, house painters, plumbers assistants and roofers were able to make a decent living. So decent in fact, that they could afford to send their kids to college and actually pay for it. Not any more.
Those construction jobs are now held mostly be immigrants (illegal and legal) who are willing and able to work for far less. The American roofers and house painters thrown out of work had their lives ruined. You know who benefited? The upper middle class who got to pay a little less to get their lawn cut or their homes remodeled. The idea that immigrants are merely filling agricultural jobs that Americans don’t want simply isn’t the whole story, Dr. Zubrin.
The author mentions that he was a delegate to a GOP state convention during the Reagan years. The establishment GOP was remarkably anti-trade Union. I’m old enough to remember the impact that Reagan’s dismissal of PATCO members had on the labor movement. The old establishment GOP that Dr. Zubrin wants to resurrect, desired nothing more than to emasculate the working class.
It’s not just the working class. How often do we read reports of Americans being fired and replaced by immigrants on H1-B visas? It seems to happen all the time. For elites in both political parties it’s a double whammy. American workers are replaced by those willing to earn less and for the immigrants, the H1-B program is a form of indentured servitude. For the Nancy Pelosi’s and Mitt Romney’s of the world that makes it “Miller-Time.”
Dr. Zubrin is right about one thing; American physicians make way too much; nothing contributes to our outrageous healthcare costs more than that. What he’s wrong about is that it’s our immigration policies are mostly to blame. The real culprit is the licensure requirements. The medical-industrial complex makes it virtually impossible for middle-aged or older foreign physicians to practice in the United States; this isn’t accidental; it’s deliberate. It’s just another example of the American clerisy protecting its own. The working class is expendable. The professionals, who our friends and neighbors; not so much.
Why stop at letting physicians into the country to reduce healthcare costs? Why not try the same thing with college professors? After all, the incredibly inflated costs of an elite college education are driven primarily by the sky high salaries of full time faculty. Rarely do these faculty members (at least at elite institutions) teach more than two courses a semester (that’s six hours a week). The rest of the time, they’re supposedly doing research. Outside of the sciences, this research is mostly (not entirely) unadulterated you know what.
How much could we reduce tuition if we replaced 25 percent of university faculty with foreign professors who would work for less and teach twice as many hours?
No one loved open borders more than woke university faculty. How much do you suppose they will like it if it was their jobs being lost instead of the job of some roofer in Ohio?
Dr. Zubrin, you have it exactly backward. It’s not that the GOP needs to abandon Trumpism; it’s that the Democratic Party needs to reacquaint itself with its inner-Trump.
The Democrats used to be the Party of working people. Democrats now despise working people with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Why do Democrats hate the working class? It’s simple; the Party is now in bed with the Clerisy which worships at the wokest of woke altars.
As for the establishment GOP; the guardians of the ideology that you want to reestablish, Dr Zubrin, it’s always hated working people. There’s no reason to think that will change any time soon.
I get it, many cosmopolitan globalists are so dainty of disposition that they got the vapors every time Trump said something rude or nasty. And to be fair, many of the things Trump said about immigrants were repugnant and wrong.
But the debate about about immigration is far more nuanced than you presented, Dr. Zubrin.
Let me ask you one last question; I’m sure there were many immigrants at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere who worked on the Mars lander. How many undocumented immigrants do you suppose worked there?
If JPL wouldn’t hire undocumented immigrants why is it right that you and I can hire them to cut our lawns?
I'm not sure I understand the point about university faculty: A great number *are* replaced by foreign students who work for less. Foreign graduate students do an enormous amount of the teaching at most universities, particularly in STEM. Students complain endlessly about their bad English: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/education/unclear-on-american-campus-what-the-foreign-teacher-said.html. The insanity of this scheme is that having given these people the best education in the world, we promptly kick them out when they graduate. We send them, usually, back to the Pacific Rim, where they found startups using the intellectual capital they acquired in the US. The venture capital follows, and then they pay taxes to other countries, not us. It's an absurdly self-defeating policy.
My point is that the same logic that Dr. Zubrin wants to apply to physicians also applies to tenure track faculty. He suggests that encouraging foreign physicians to practice in the United States might significantly lower health care costs; he’s right about that. U.S health care costs are driven in large part by physician salaries. His idea is a great one with the caveat that once you let them in you have to create a regulatory environment that permits them to work. Those regulations are set by the states, not the federal government.
Higher education in the United States is as bloated and expensive as health care. A major driver of these costs is the compensation paid to tenure track faculty who, for the most part, simply don’t work that hard (outside of the sciences).
Much of the teaching is done by graduate students who are often foreign and adjuncts who earn next to nothing.
In the meantime, the overpaid and underworked faculty typically teach 3-6 hours a week often teaching courses they’ve taught scores of times and don’t need to prepare for. Add in a few hours a week to meet with students and the pedagogical efforts of professors at elite universities typically comes to less than ten hours a week. At these institutions the more senior you are, the less work you do. Full professors teach less than assistant professors. It’s these overpaid faculty members who drive tuition costs sky high not the measly wages of graduate students and adjuncts.
At the most prestigious institutions, average salaries for full professors are well into the six figures; it’s a great gig if you can get it. Who wouldn’t want to be highly compensated for thinking great thoughts in between latte runs to Starbucks?
Point out to faculty that they are overpaid and underworked and they quickly tell you about how much effort they put into their research. Outside of the sciences while some of this research is valuable, most of it is junk. This “research” mostly ends up in obscure journals which are filled with poorly written paper that no one reads and influences nothing.
Tenured faculty have it even better; they hardly have to work at all and they can’t be fired (though these days telling an joke with a sexual innuendo is often enough to negate tenure).
Dr. Zubrin is right; we could lower medical costs by importing foreign doctors who are happy to work for less to compete with American doctors.
How do we know? Well, after all, it worked for roofers and house painters. We let immigrants with those skills come in and it drove the Americans who once held those jobs to distraction and despair. Often we drove them (and their children) to divorce and opioid addiction.
Why not reduce college costs the same way. Dr. Zubrin wants to lower medical costs vLet’s eliminate tenure, fire 25 percent of the professoriate and replace these faculty members with immigrants willing to earn less and teach more? Harvard, Yale and Princeton could set up recruiting stations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Claire, maybe you could recommend some Turkish faculty anxious to escape Erdogan’s clutches and who are willing to work for bargain basement prices.
The bigger point is that American elites are enamored of immigration only because they’ve set up a system where the American working class pays the price while upper middle class people are not impacted at all. Do you suppose college faculty (the most pro-immigration cohort in the United States) would be as enamored of the idea if it was their jobs being threatened?
This all has nothing to do with capitalism or market economics and everything to do with hatred. The modern American clerisy hates working people and has disdain for the less educated. Our rulers in times past (the industrial elite) at least had a sense of noblesse oblige. Our current rulers are unrelentingly selfish, narcissistic and gluttonous.
Dr. Zubrin points out that our economy is not a zero sum game; he’s right. On the whole, immigration creates more jobs than it destroys. That’s small comfort to the roofer who’s job was taken by an immigrant willing to work for half the salary and now faces the prospect of supporting his family on a hamburger-flippers wages. It only makes it worse when that now unemployed roofer hears a lazy, hypocritical college professor criticize him and his neighbors for being religion-clinging, gun-slinging bigots.
Unless we find a way to create opportunity for workers who will never be college educated, we may soon find that we don’t have a country left.
Come to think of it, aren’t most of the problems our nation faces, including the immigration imbroglio, caused by hyper-educated and remarkably well-credentialed nincompoops?
Are you being facetious? Because your proposal genuinely sounds reasonable to me. I'm fully on board with replacing overpaid, underperforming college faculty with hardworking immigrants.
You agree that on the whole, immigration creates more jobs than it destroys. Does this lead you to favor more immigration? Or do you think that certain categories of people--roofers, for example--need to be protected, at all costs, at the expense of everyone else? If so, why?
I agree that we need to protect people whose jobs disappear (because of immigration or technological change) if they're too old to acquire new skills. I don't think we should protect them, though, by banning immigration and technological change. We'd still be weaving textiles by hand if we thought that way. (And our population would still be 2.5 million people, as it was at our Founding.) The aim of our economic policies should be "giving rise to a large, flourishing, prosperous middle class," not protecting any given industry or demographic group.
As for the charge that "The modern American clerisy hates working people and has disdain for the less educated," do you mean academics? Or anyone whose income is above X? How high is X, do you think?
I’m certainly not being facetious. I’m suggesting that it’s hard to create a rational system of immigration without simultaneously constructing a rational trade policy and also considering other factors like the worship of credentialism. These factors consort with each other to put the working class through the wringer. Each reduces employment opportunities for people without a university degree.
I believe that immigration is a net positive for the United States and that the fearlessness, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to work hard of immigrants makes our country far stronger.
But I also believe that the immigration system we have now, which insures that it’s only Americans without college degrees who have to compete with immigrants willing to work for slave wages, is profoundly unfair.
These less educated Americans are already seeing jobs they once were eligible for disappear because of the heinous rise of credentialism. To make matters worse, they are the prime victims of labor arbitrage.
I would like to see much more immigration from people poised to compete with highly educated Americans for jobs; then we would see how genuine the sympathy for immigrants amongst the upper middle classes really is.
As for a rational trade policy, your analogy to the situation with Thatcher and the miners doesn’t apply here.
In the United States, the energy sector is highly competitive and employed tens of thousands of non-college educated Americans in high paying jobs. This sector thrived under Trump but the writing is on the wall with Biden (see the Keystone Pipeline). American environmental policy is yet another example of the livelihood of working class Americans being sacrificed while the upper-middle classes prattle on blissfully disinterested in what’s happening to their fellow citizens.
I think that you’re also wrong to pose the issue of trade as a zero sum competition between protectionism and free trade. If we want to support immigration, we need to be sensitive to the employment prospects of native born Americans. There are plenty of capitalist countries that have balanced capitalism with a mercantilistic patina. Germany, South Korea and Japan come to mind. So does the faux-communist People's Republic of China. None of these nations are sacrificing innovation on the altar of protectionism. They are simply finding a middle ground (something Trump started and Biden seems to be continuing.)
Then there’s the issue of legal versus illegal immigration that Dr. Zubrin didn’t even touch on. News reports from the southern border, if they are to be believed, suggest that Biden’s policies are proving to be a disaster. Of course, that’s from my perspective. Given that a substantial number of left-wing democrats believe that the mere concept of borders is inherently racist, for them, the current policies are a feature not a bug.
Also, given the intersectionalist orientation of intellectual elites in the Democratic Party, these cadres believe that poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants are simply more important to protect than native-born Americans. In fact, they believe that these native-born Americans who’s lives are being destroyed are getting exactly what they deserve. As unemployable and opioid-addled as they may be, to the Democratic-left, these folks are the oppressors.
Perhaps you don’t get CNN or MSNBC in Paris, Claire. If you did, you would know that large swaths of the journalistic class, the punditocracy and the intellectual yet idiot class that populates American higher education truly has disdain for the American working class. Given the role that these “intellectuals” play in our “deep state” this is very sad.
Yes, in fact, these people are haters. Who do they hate?
The most vulnerable among us.
Perhaps you should re-read my comments WigWam where I indicate that there is little evidence in Massachusetts at least that illegal immigrants have taken jobs away in the construction trades. In fact it is generally known at least in the Boston area that there is a shortage of workers in the construction trades.
However, I will cede one point to you when I lived in Florida for a short time I do definitely believe there was an extensive population of construction workers who were undocumented. Right next to where I lived there was a new housing development being built by KB Homes where a parade of the most broken down vans with blown out windows covered by trash bags would show up every morning with what I suspected at the time to be very poorly paid undocumented workers. I will make two observations however about Florida. Which presidential candidate did Florida overwhelmingly vote for in the last Presidential election and which party affiliation is the current governor of Florida Gov. De Santis? Second which among us me and you WigWam, left Florida to move back to Massachusetts shortly after encountering seeing a broken down van with trash bags for windows showing up next door every morning or is now moving to Florida from New York City because a couple of packages from Amazon got stolen from the lobby of their apartment building.
First WigWam de-industrialization started at least in some parts of the US a long long time ago long before the era of post 1945 mass immigration and free trade. For example if you go to the mill towns of New England de-industrialization starts at least as far back as 100 years ago but because at that point the jobs where moving to other parts of the US no one outside of New England cared about de-industrialization. MIT moved from Boston to what commonly called CambridgePort(now known as Kendall Square) in 1916 as in part as it was an industrial area that even in 1916 was falling on hard times and where MIT could buy abandoned factory land quite cheaply. For a long time time long before Kendall Square became the hub of biotechnology it was the hub of candy manufacturing in the US and in fact Junior Mints are still made by Tootsie Rolls Candy co. kitty corner across the street from the Moderna HQ in a last remaining outpost of confectionary. But back in those days autoworkers say in the "heartland" Detroit suburbs living high on the hog of their UAW contracts had little sympathy for the plight of New England.
https://www3.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/05/04/junior-mints-and-more-this-factory-makes-pieces-candy-day/6FnR6v44GuDm96hgmxG6vK/story.html?arc404=true
I have linked to this video a couple of times on Twitter just to show for example how back in 1968 supposedly the golden era of the American middle class and American economy just how run down the cities of Boston and it's waterfront was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m22g4qbm2Q
So the analogy I would use is if people in the industrial heartland didn't that much when Boston was down and out which should people in Boston care when the Midwest industrial heartland is now done and out.
Another point which I will have to follow up in a future comment is at least in the Boston area, perhaps it is different in NYC people in the construction trade do very very well. Like making well over $100,000 a year well if not in some cases $200,000 a year well. Additionally I doubt you well find many undocumented workers at the many large scaled construction sites were work is currently underway in Boston or Cambridge. I personally even from a residential homeowners perspective I don't believe I have ever hired anyone who is an illegal immigrant and in general just from the prices they charged me personally and my knowledge of the economy plumbers, electricians, and carpenters in Massachusetts even those who specialize in residential instead of commercial and institutional do very very well financially.
Yes, this is correct. American manufacturing peaked in 1920; a small, upward tick in manufacturing, mid-century, is attributable to the Second World War. The 20th century saw the complete transformation of the American labor force: At the beginning of the century, Americans were chiefly employed in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors; we're now almost entirely employed in the service sector. This pattern of economic development is seen everywhere. The exception is South Korea, where manufacturing has stabilized at around 40 percent of GDP since the early 1990s--but South Korea was a largely agrarian country only 50 years ago, before it began an extremely rapid industrialization process. Some developing countries skip right over manufacturing and go straight from agriculture to services. The switch to a primarily service-based economy is the definition of economic development; trying to prevent this from happening is nuts; it amounts to deliberately keeping your economy undeveloped as an unskilled-workers job creation scheme. It makes much more sense to focus on transforming unskilled workers into skilled ones. Yes, "learn to code" is byword for "out-of-touch policy proposal," but ultimately it isn't wrong. Yes, for many workers, it's impossible: They're too old to learn. But this is, ultimately, what has to happen to our displaced manufacturing labor force: retraining for high-skilled jobs. We can't artificially keep factories open as a form of social engineering. This is exactly the battle Thatcher fought (and won): She refused to keep the coal mines open after they ceased to be economically viable. She was right to insist upon this. There was no way for the UK to continue to compete on coal; economies have to mature and change. You're right that I embrace "unrestricted free trade as if it was received truth." The alternative to free trade is a planned economy--some form of socialism, communism, or fascism, in other words--and the evidence against planned economies is in. They don't work.
I *do* think the complaint that those of us who embrace free trade have been insensate to the human costs of capitalism is correct. The social dislocation that have accompanied this shift (from agriculture to manufacturing to services) has been enormous, and we haven't done enough to cushion those most affected. But keeping factories that aren't competitive open artificially isn't the solution. That's the federal job guarantee that AOC favors. Many on the right grasp that this is a bad idea when AOC proposes it, but they don't seem to grasp why it's a bad idea when Tucker Carlson proposes roughly the same thing. Robert is right to say that the difference between AOC's socialism and Tucker Carlson's is a heaping dose of nationalism. The difference between the Trump GOP and AOC isn't their economic vision. It's where they come down in the culture war.
I do think Robert's kidding himself if he thinks the GOP is about to see the light and embrace economic freedom and immigration. The GOP is *only* about the culture war now (and fundraising). People like Robert--and me, for that matter--will find it easier to push the Democrats to the sensible center than to bring the GOP back from looney-world. The only thing that will achieve that, I suspect, is repeated defeat.
I do think there is and was a more left-leaning alternative to what Thatcher did with the UK coal miners that should be given more consideration which is what Mitterand did with French coal miners in the mid-1980s which was like Thatcher to acknowledge coal mining in France was a dead industry that govt needed to shut down but Mitterand also gave very generous severance payments for life to those coal workers who were above the age to be able to retrain for another career.
Now there significant differences between the shutdown of the coal mines in France vs those in Britain even though it was occurring at the same time. First, the coal miners in France did not have the same political muscle and militancy as those in the UK and the industry as a whole was smaller than in the UK. I also think the mine shutdowns in France were sold as a consequence of the shift to nuclear power and one of technological change instead of an economic change. Furthermore, the high likelihood of coal mining being discontinued in France was obvious going all the way back to the Messmer plan under George Pompidou in 1974. Perhaps even earlier as one could say nuclear energy for power generation was a logical next step for France as a historically energy insecure nation after DeGaulle's atomic bomb program in the 1960s.
Britain after Thatcher closed the mines did continue to burn lots of coal but it was cheaper imported coal which I think is still is justifiable but one that does seem on the surface to be harsher than Mitterand's justification which was simply France no longer had a need to burn coal now having nuclear power. I will also add there were some in Britain who were intrigued with going down the French path of massive nuclear power such as Thatcher's intraparty nemesis Michael Heseltine but she rejected the high costs of French style nuclear buildout in part by Britain's possession of North Sea Oil and Gas which was coming online right at this time.
One reason why I sometimes give Claire a hard time about her book is I think there is this narrative of Britain especially post Thatcher of being the buccaneering free-market paradise with Mitterand's France of being slow, hidebound, and sclerotic and the problem is I just don't think this is so clear cut when you look at the facts on the ground.
Another interesting story is the Thatcher-Mitterand partnership on the Channel Tunnel and why both supported the project for their own vastly different reasons(Mitterand for his part wanted the tunnel as a way of shifting the redundant workforce of SNCF to a new business line without actually laying off large numbers of unionized railroad workers). In effect, Mitterand knew SNCF had way too many workers for the amount of passenger and cargo it carried but if you built the Channel Tunnel you would create a whole new market for rail service where one previously did not exist and thus shift over this excess workforce at SNCF to serve this new rail line i.e. Eurostar/Eurotunnel without laying people off. Thatcher, of course, had no interest in this what you might call "creative" labor policy instead she wanted to prove the tunnel as a piece of major infrastructure could be built with solely private capital.
I will also add that more than just there a lot of immigrants at JPL I believe the current director of JPL is an immigrant or at least the one immediately preceding was. Actually there are a ton of immigrants in the space program and BTW there were a ton even back in the golden era of the 1960s(i.e. all the German engineers from operation Paper Clip). In fact it has long been a given the US would have never made it to the Moon without immigrants even back in the golden era of the 1960s.
Saying I am sure there were a lot of immigrants who worked on the Mars lander at JPL is an understatement. There would NOT be any Mars lander without immigrants.
As to your point about University faculty I would say immigrants are represented quite well among faculty members although probably less so in some areas of law and political science(which is probably relevant to your point). However, my personal opinion is in areas of law and political science you start getting closer to the political system and anti-immigrant sentiment on both sides. I will say if you are a foreign born professor in law or political science in the US I do think there is an expectation be very patriotic and always assume the American way is the best way from both the right and the left.