Business must be able to move around labor just like machines, raw materials, and finished products, per Business Week economist Michael Mandel:
Commentary: Globalization vs. Immigration Reform By Michael Mandel Business Week, June 4, 2007 ... Immigration reform, in any flavor, has to contend with today's central reality: In a world where goods, capital, ideas, and services are becoming more and more mobile and able to cross national borders, tighter restrictions on the movement of people are increasingly anachronistic. Just look at IBM, which has for decades been one of the leading lights of the U.S. economy. The company, which earned more than $9 billion in 2006, now has two-thirds of its workers abroad, both foreign nationals and American citizens. It's becoming a "globally integrated enterprise," as CEO Samuel J. Palmisano noted in IBM's latest annual report, "which locates its operations and functions anywhere in the world based on the right cost, the right skills, and the right business environment." ... http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_23/b4037042.htm He chose IBM as the example wisely. As far back as the 1950s, IBM chose to assemble ferrite core memory by the hands of women in Japan in preference to the machinery it had available for the same task in Kingston, NY (as I recount in From Capitalism to Equality, p. 117). But heck, if people today are willing to come to Kingston and work for the same wage prevailing in the Philippines, why not? (Ok, today hand labor cannot compete with automated semiconductor manufacture, but they can be nursing home aides.) Charles Andrews
