UNEMPLOYED? WORRIED? READ THIS

Date: Monday, July 14, 2003 3:39 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

I thought these two articles make excellent companions.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/s_144043.html

Aliens are putting educated Americans out of work

By Donald Collins
Friday, July 11, 2003

When an issue gets really personal, such as having your son or daughter
go fight the war in Iraq, you get involved. You pay attention. You
care. Why aren't we paying attention to another invasion? This time an
invasion of our own country. Let me explain. My sons, now both over 40,
have been lucky about avoiding hot wars, too young for Vietnam, too old
for the all-volunteer service.

However, the current raging immigrant invasion of the United States has
become for me very personal. One of my sons, an electrical engineering
grad with 23 years of service to the same company and more than 30
patents to his credit, just sent me a letter in which he says:

"My company is replacing 40 percent of our engineers with offshore
people now at a 25 percent savings overall. Simultaneously, we are
asked to work 50 to 100 percent faster. There will be burnout. These
American engineers, who are advised they are to be let go shortly, have
been instructed to train their offshore replacements. I guess there
won't be as many affluent Americans to buy our products in the future."

OFF TO INDIA

A lot of this outsourcing goes to India. A June 18 Christian Science
Monitor article reported "India Winning Higher Status Jobs From U.S."
U.S. companies used to send mundane data-processing jobs there, but now
more and more "U.S. firms are farming out much more sophisticated work
... taking advantage of skilled accountants, market researchers, and
medical technicians ... who work for nickels on the dollar."

The global corporations see the wage disparities and grab them. A table
in this same CSM article cites the average salaries for Information
Technology programmers (Source: CIO magazine, 11-15-02). A U.S.
programmer makes slightly over $63,000 a year versus an Indian
programmer who gets $5,880, a Filipino who gets $6,564, a Russian about
$6,000, a Chinese about $9,000.

So middle-class, educated Americans with advanced skills are hurt both
ways. Aliens come in on temporary visas, particularly H-1Bs, or the
lesser-known but fast emerging L1 visa program for "intercompany
transferees."

According to a May 2003 report from the Federation for American
Immigration Reform, or FAIR, this program permits multinational
companies to transfer employees from a foreign corporation to a U.S.
branch, parent, subsidiary or affiliated entity for up to seven years.

This L1 program parallels the offshore replacement my son is seeing at
his company, where, as FAIR President Dan Stein notes, "Replaced
American workers have ... been forced to train their foreign
replacements before being shown the door." FAIR cites the latest
figures: In 2001, 328,480 L1 workers entered the United States, as well
as 384,191 on H-1B, plus 144,911 L1 visas were given to the spouses and
dependents of the L1 visa "temporary" workers.

We used to think we could bring in "cheap labor" to do menial jobs. Our
affluents were delighted to pay low wages to immigrants, most of whom
were uneducated and willing to do any job to escape the poverty caused
by the uncontrolled burgeoning populations in many developing
countries. Now, the people of the American middle class, the bulwark of
our nation, are finding their jobs threatened two ways by the
globalizing of the world economy: Smart, inexpensive workers now come
here from overseas, as well as getting outsourced work from
multinationals sent to them at home.

SECOND-CLASS NATION

Competition frequently sends production to the low-price producers
overseas. So what do we do? If nothing, we are on our way to
second-class-nation status. China and India are becoming huge economic
blocs in Asia, while Japan, the once and future king of economic
success, sits in a stagnant economic stew. Cheaper labor will continue
to be a factor in economic decisions.

What we need to do is stop bringing in unlimited cheap labor -- now
well over a million a year -- for the short-term benefit of a few
employers who claim the jobs these desperate foreign cheapies fill are
ones Americans won't do. Americans won't pluck chickens for the $10 an
hour now being paid. We need some immigration, but not 1.6 million
immigrants a year, of which half are uneducated and here illegally.

If we took in 300,000 aliens selected by reasonable standards, our
needs would be met. We need to invest more in educating our own
citizens, not importing cheap techies or sending many of our best jobs
overseas and thus destroying our middle class and denigrating our
hard-earned U.S. lifestyle.

Too many U.S. citizens like my educated son are being jeopardized by
globalization. The key message: It's not cheap labor we need, but more,
faster automation. Unless we concentrate on better educating our own,
putting renewed emphasis on higher-skill training of our own and
installing more automation, more rapidly, every place we can, we will
find our standard of living, our environment and our beautiful America
ruined.

We already have more people than America can serve at current
standards. We will be generating more pollution and crowding than ever,
more loss of open space. Those millions of illegal aliens who came
initially to work at slave-labor prices since the law changed in 1965
mostly lack education, which results in little upward mobility
generation to generation.

Their growing frustrations will add more crime and instability. Another
130 million aliens will be here permanently by 2050 if we do not cut
immigration by setting a national immigration policy. Think about this
bleak picture and urge your leaders to take steps now to make U.S.
immigration policies fair.

Donald Collins, a board member of FAIR, is a freelance writer living in
Washington, D.C. who often writes for the Trib on the immigration
issue.

UNEMPLOYED? WORRIED? READ THIS.

By Carl F. Worden

Now that at least 6% of you are unemployed in the United States and
have more free time to read, perhaps youd like to know why you no
longer have a job, why your job-finding prospects are bleak, why our
trade deficit is off the charts and even more importantly, who did this
to you.

In order for you to fully grasp what Im about to write, well need
to review what worked to make this nation the most wealthy and powerful
nation ever to grace the face of this earth.

First, we need to remember how wealth is created. The average high
school graduate comes out thinking that if they get more of the money
others have, then thats the way to create wealth. They dont have
a clue about wealth creation, because in most cases, the schools
dont teach it, and most of the kids parents dont know either
-- so herewith is a refresher course.

In the most perfect scenario, and one that the United States of America
just happened to follow, this nation was established on a continent
that was blessed with magnificent amounts of raw materials, like wood
and metals, and an agricultural breadbasket that could produce far more
food than the domestic population could possibly eat. Add to that
potent mix a population with a strong work ethic, solid moral integrity
and the freedom to be as personally successful as they want to be, and
the Founding Fathers just let human nature take its course.

Those raw materials are mined and harvested, then manufactured into
items of quality and desirability that the entire world wants to
purchase. That is how wealth is created. The same goes for a vigorous
agricultural program: You plant a seed and water it, it grows and
produces whatever, you sell it, and voila! Youve created wealth.

In the meantime, people need to be employed in order to manufacture and
grow things, and if you employ someone, you have to pay them for their
contribution to your efforts. As time goes by, more and more of your
domestic population becomes employed, which means they are making money
and able to purchase land, homes, cars and other things themselves.

Over time, our growing domestic population became this nations
largest consumer of U.S. manufactured goods. Because of our
Constitution and our Republican form of government, our people were
free to explore and invent with little or no government intervention.
This led to technological advances that produced goods of such fine
quality and craftsmanship that no other nation could compete with us at
the same level. The world could buy cheaper goods of lower quality
made in Japan, for example, but if you wanted quality that would last,
you bought American. As a result, wealth poured into this nation,
creating more millionaires per capita than any other nation on earth.

As our population came to earn more and more money in salaries and
wages, our domestic manufacturers employing those workers had to charge
more and more for their goods at the wholesale level in order to
maintain a profit and stay healthy.

The workers employed in other nations earned far less than our workers,
so in theory, they could produce manufactured goods at a lower cost
than our domestic manufacturers could. The problem is that they
generally lacked the raw materials we had in such abundance, and they
also lacked our superior manufacturing technology, making foreign-made
goods generally inferior.

Even so, the United States maintained tariffs and trade restrictions
that forced the shelf price of imported manufactured goods high enough
to keep their price comparable to the goods produced by American
manufacturers

As a result, the American standard of living kept climbing and
outpacing that of the rest of the world by leaps and bounds.

Later on, foreign manufacturers managed to steal a great deal of our
technology, but the tariffs and trade restrictions still kept doing
their intended duty of protecting American jobs.

That is what made America the most wealthy and powerful nation on the
face of this earth, and all that changed with the passage of NAFTA and
GATT in 1994. We are now hemorrhaging jobs and wealth to other
nations, particularly China, at such an astonishing rate that there is
no foreseeable way to stop the carnage. The North American Free Trade
Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs quite
literally slashed Americas economic throat. NAFTA/GATT were pushed
through by the Republicans, and signed into law by President Bill
Clinton over the strenuous objections of his fellow Democrats.

NAFTA/GATT removed our last line of defense against unfair foreign
competition by manufacturers who now use cheap labor, equal
manufacturing technology and even our own raw materials to compete with
American manufacturers in a so-called free market. NAFTA/GATT were
international treaties requiring a 2/3 Senate approval votes they
didnt have so they just passed them as regular legislation.
Incredibly, when American labor unions challenged the passage of
NAFTA/GATT as unconstitutional, the Supreme Court let them stand!

So what I want you to understand here is that all legal means for
ridding ourselves of those treasonous acts have been exhausted. Our
elected representatives show no signs of wanting to end our
participation in NAFTA/GATT, therefore nothing short of a bloody and
violent revolution to take this government back will have any chance of
stopping our economic nosedive. This slide will not, and indeed,
cannot end until our wages and our standard of living have equalized
with the rest of the world.

Ross Perot held the public forum during his presidential campaign, and
screamed from the rooftops that if NAFTA/GATT were passed, wed hear
this giant sucking sound of American manufacturing jobs going to other
nations, remember that? He was out-shouted by that truth-impaired
radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, who assured us all that NAFTA/GATT
were a good thing for America and would enable American consumers to
buy manufactured and other goods at substantially lower prices.

Where it comes to basic math and economics, Rush Limbaugh is definitely
not the guy to ask. You have to have a job to buy manufactured goods
and foodstuffs, no matter what the price, right? And if American
manufacturers close their plants in America and start manufacturing in
China and elsewhere, as they had to do in order to stay competitive and
viable, doesnt that mean those high-paying American manufacturing
jobs are now held by slave-laborers in China? Is this treason starting
to sink in yet? You didnt seem to care when you had a job, right?
Well, Ill bet you do now.

Oh, and what about those lowered prices for foreign-made goods we were
promised ala Limbaugh? Seen any lately? No?? And why? Because the
formerly American and foreign manufacturers now in China and Taiwan
didnt have to lower them! All they had to do was lower their price
a buck or two under what the American manufacturer had to sell the same
product for here.

You see, it doesnt matter that it only costs them pennies on the
dollar to make the same item an American manufacturer does. They have
no obligation whatsoever to pass those savings on to you and me if they
dont have to and under NAFTA/GATT they dont have to! The whole
idea is to make the highest possible profit while remaining
competitive, right? Well, if thats the case, then prices wont
drop until Americans have lost so many family-wage paying jobs that
they simply cannot afford to pay the higher prices anymore.

I wish I could end this article with a ray of hope for our economy, but
I cannot. If we are to have free trade with other nations, then the
inevitable result will have to be our parity in living standards with
the rest of the global community, and because we have a comparatively
high standard of living, it naturally follows that our standard of
living will have to decline. This is Math 101, and theres no way
around it.

I just read an interesting Associated Press article at
(http://www.msnbc.com/news/937578.asp?0cv=BB10&cp1=1)

If you have been paying attention to this mess, youll recall that
President Bush slapped a 30% tariff of foreign steel imported to the
United States. At the time he did it, I couldnt figure out where
NAFTA/GATT allowed him to do it, but if they did, why dont we just
slap tariffs on all imported foreign goods to protect our remaining
domestic manufacturers who are too stupid to close up and move to
China?

Well, I just got my answer: The World Trade Organization, whose rules
we agreed to abide by under NAFTA/GATT, just ruled Bushs tariff
violates global trade rules. If the American appeal fails, we
taxpayers will pay a stiff fine and thousands more American steel
manufacturing jobs will be lost.

Would you like to hear some good news? I thought so. Here goes:

I just read somewhere that China was being lauded for having reduced
its poverty level by more than half. I wonder how they did it, and
where they got the money?

Carl F. Worden

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Rob Sanchez is board member of NAEA - www.NAEA.US

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