Category Archives: Outsourcing

UPDATED: Displacing America (Ready To Outsource)

IMMIGRATION, Labor, Nationhood, Outsourcing

The open-border fetishist often has a job lobbying, broadcasting or litigating, and feels nothing for Americans who don’t have work, unless they are migrants. This prototypical character will dismiss the following figures from Patrick J. Buchanan’s column, “Is This Our America Anymore?”, with a correlation-is-not-causation quip:

Buried in the Oct. 30 Washington Post was a bland headline: “Report Points to Faster Recovery in Jobs for Immigrants.” [by Shankar Vedantam]
The story, however, contained social dynamite that explains the rage of Americans who are smeared as nativists and xenophobes for demanding a timeout on immigration.
In the April-May-June quarter, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs. And native-born Americans lost 1.2 million. [VDARE.com note: See Pew Confirms VDARE.COM On American Worker Displacement, By Edwin S. Rubenstein]
From July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs. Native-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white U.S. construction workers lost 511,000 jobs.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, from Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2010, 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered the United States, a decade in which America lost 1 million jobs.
From 2008 and 2009, the figures are startling. In 24 months, 2.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrived, as U.S. citizens were losing 8.6 million jobs.
Query: Why are we importing a million-plus workers a year when 17 million Americans can’t find work? Whose country is this? .”

I confess, however, to developing reservations about the American work force. These misgivings, some of which were voiced in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” are based on my limited, but fairly consistent, contact with what I’ve dubbed “The North American Personality.” Personally, I’m ready to outsource. Later.

UPDATE (Dec. 19): Here are the OECD’s ratings of “Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science.” The US scores statistically significantly below the OECD average on the mathematics scale. That’s all you need to know. The top scoring countries across the board are Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, and Singapore.

Just last week, international financier Jim Rogers told Judge Andrew Napolitano of “Freedom Watch” that he moved to Singapore because, among other reasons, the people have a wicked work ethic and they save their money. He likened the Asians of today to Americans in the 1950s. The Americans I’ve had to interact with professionally (irrespective of political persuasion) hold highly inflated opinions of their meager abilities, are slack, full of attitude, lazy, and quite rude.

Something I could not figure out: They complain about not having money, but refuse the odd job offered to them (from these quarters) as if it were beneath them.

On Parrot Power & Other “Deep Technical Skills”

English, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Labor, Outsourcing, Parrots, Politics

I just had to correct the first error I found in John Derbyshire’s terrific book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. (Read it!)

It’s an analogy that occurs on page 108: “Parrot-brained politicians.”

As you know, the author of the much-reviled columns, “In Defense of Michael Vick,” Parts One and Two, loves parrots and has two (T. Cup and Oscar-Wood). Parrots are enchanting, highly intelligent creatures.

Besides, can any politician problem-solve as this magic macaw does? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch:

Jokes aside, Derb has a list of “deep technical skills” required to power a modern economy (p. 112). Other than the “structural engineer,” whom you would hope has a considerable facility with theory/math too (if those bridges are to stand), I don’t see how trades such as “TV studio lighting,” or “orthodontistry” (as opposed dentistry), horticulture, aircraft maintenance, crane operating, or bond trading quite qualify as “deep technical skills.”

(Where do electrical engineers and computer scientists fall? These are the people who supply the dumb, difficult and dispensable young—the twittering twits—with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.)

A minor query, a magnificent book. I guess I was looking for an excuse to chat about and recommend We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.

Barefoot In Bollywood

Barack Obama, Business, English, Free Markets, Outsourcing, Regulation, Technology, Trade

That’s our First Lady, Mrs. Michelle Obama. “Almost immediately after arriving at the university [of Mumbai’s] library, she kicked off her flats and joined in a game of vocabulary-building hopscotch with the 8- to 13-year-old orphans and runaways who receive English-language instruction from Make a Difference volunteers,” reports CBC.

“I love dancing. Oh that was fun!’ Mrs. Obama said after they danced to the theme song from the Bollywood movie ‘Rang de Basanti.'”

A grass skirt and a pail of water on her head would have completed Mrs. Obama’s regal regalia. (What horrid “music” she’s bumping and grinding to.)

It’s interesting that these kids are receiving English-language instruction. Hardly something Michelle would be fighting for back at home. She’d be the “English as a Second Language ‘Program” advocate.

Meanwhile, Michelle’s less earthy husband is talking a good game against outsourcing, and doing what he does best: central planning, promising tax breaks to companies that create jobs in America.

Strange: the president visits India, which is outsourcing central, only to tell his put-upon hosts that he wants to discourage their bread-and-butter industry.

Obama would do better to ponder the following: In the U.S., companies endure endless, punishing, government-imposed regulations, which make doing business and staying competitive increasingly difficult. Foreign investors in China and India are not subject to more than 180 federal labor laws; to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an IRS and an EPA; or to a work force where merit is marred by affirmative action. To the cost of the assorted alphabet soup of regulatory agencies a corporation must pay off in the U.S., add exorbitant corporate taxes and expenses like workers compensation insurance … as well as the cost of a government rape known as Social Security.

Factored into the wage price the corporation pays are, thus, large government-imposed costs. The company’s before-tax wage package must offset the cost of the income-tax burden as well as the cost of Social Security. Without the onerous government taxes, this American employee would cost the firm 30 to 40 percent less.

Consider that the annual Social Security burden alone on an American high-tech employee, borne by the employer, is the equivalent of the annual salary of a high-tech worker living well in India—and the logic of outsourcing is self-evident!

Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of the book “Outsourcing America,” knows how corporate America works. Via the WaPo:

“They have successfully built a business model where not only do they offshore large numbers of jobs, but the fraction that remain in the U.S. are filled by lower-paid foreign guest workers … They are often also forced to train their foreign replacements.”

This is indeed the model. You have to be at the top of your game to retain viable employment as an engineer in the US.

Zombie Zakaria Has Some “Ideas” For You

Affirmative Action, America, Education, Europe, Government, Labor, Multiculturalism, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Science, Technology

Fareed Zakaria: is there anyone more inane and wishy-washy than he? Zombie Zakaria’s “Restoring the American Dream” presentation is in the tradition you’ve come to expect from this CNN pundit.

Thus, Fareed vows to “bring you solutions” to “the hollowing out of the middle class” by growing the state’s role in R & D, for, as he concludes, “Almost all of the science and technology research that we take for granted now came out of the Defense Department spending post World War II.”

But surely, and logically, we cannot assert that because the DOD (the Department of Defense) gave rise to certain technologies, without it these inventions would not exist, as ZZ claims? It might be the case that sans state intervention, there would be even more innovation than with it.

This guy’s “ideas” are festooned with similar falsehoods.

Another of ZZ’s lessons comes courtesy of the super-productive German workforce.

“Despite some of the highest wages in the world, strong unions, lots of regulation, Germany has maintained a very powerful manufacturing base, employing millions,” ZZ opined. “It has held in good stead during this economic crisis. Germany’s unemployment rate has actually fallen for the past 15 months straight, an unbelievable record in this economic climate.”

As ZZ narrated the above passage, images of industrious German factory workers flashed on the screen, and were contrasted with the long lines of the unemployed in America. Guess what the American assembly and unemployment lines look like? You are right: By comparison, the German workforce so famous for its industry looked relatively homogeneous.

Still, ZZ hopes to apply efficiencies learned from the German cohort to America’s increasingly third-world, imported, underclass of workers. (“The United States,” we are told, “now ranks 52nd in the world in quality of science and math education.” It used to have “very high levels of performance in math and science.” What happened other than suffocating unionization in education, third-world immigration, and affirmative action?)

As Fareed and his well-to-do, high-achieving (indubitably high IQ) guests conclude, and I paraphrase, opportunities are indeed boundless if somebody has the smarts and the motivation; everybody can be the designer of an iPod or a programmer at Google; this essentially, is not a rarified group. Any one can get to be at “the top end of America.”

ZZ’s smart panel, which can never be called an interest group plumping for government/taxpayer subsidies (no never!), included Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola; Lou Gerstner, who has run R.J. Reynolds, American Express and IBM; and Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO of Alcoa, the aluminum giant.

All were agreed that laborers are interchangeable in as much as potential is concerned, and if given the right conditions by government.

I have advocated in my writings for “a natural shift from a credit-fueled, consumption-based economy, to one founded on savings, investment and production.”

ZZ favors only a shift from consumption to investment; massive federal-government investment.