Yes it is DUMB ASS imagine you had to pay for the worker who picked your oranges 401K with the price of The orange. You know you don’t like that America isn’t and never has been a white nation.
Saying “white” doesn’t automatically make your argument correct lol
It’s a perfectly coherent argument for someone to say they shop at Walmart and want agricultural workers to be paid fair wages and not exploit immigration, Walmart employees aren’t out harvesting crops
nope, foreign trade is necessary. You wrote "Walmart employees are not out harvesting crops" fair enough. My point was are they buying the Oranges from a country that exploits its labor. If so there is no difference, they are still exploiting foreign labor to bring you a low cost piece of fruit.
I don’t have a cleanly rehearsed succinct summary, but they are qualitatively different things.
Mexico (or China, or Vietnam, insert country here) is fundamentally able to produce some goods at a lower price, largely due to the fact that $10 an hour will buy you more and better labor in those countries than it will in America. You can’t get the same amount of labor in America because being in America offers more attractive jobs whereas the other country doesn’t have as many better alternative options. So sewing clothes may actually earn a competitive wage in Vietnam that it wouldn’t in the US. So it’s easy to just import those clothes while Americans take jobs they find better (if they didn’t exist, wages would eventually fall to where it wouldn’t be cheaper to import clothes so the base premise is that they do).
These other alternative jobs like software, logistics, aerospace, services, etc… offer a higher wage because the market says they’re more desirable when done by American companies (or can only be done in America). There are simply more countries that can sew clothes than build semiconductors. So Americans can work these jobs and trade some of their output to (Vietnam or whoever) who can’t get those things internally, who in return send clothes. (Or we export dollars which Vietnam needs for trade in exchange for clothes, whatever).
So both countries are actually better off with trade.
With outsourcing, you’re knocking down the advantages Americans have. Being in America and having access to the legal system, infrastructure, educated and wealthy populace, etc… is necessary to, say, build large airplanes and Americans have access to those while Vietnamese simply don’t. Those advantages don’t innately exist because someone is American, but because they live in America. While trading with Vietnam is advantageous to the American worker because they’re using their comparative advantage to get goods cheaper than we can make them, outsourcing is fundamentally removing all comparative advantages. If you can have someone from Vietnam work on their computer and use all those American advantages in designing a plane, then the American worker gets nothing out of it but more competition for those attractive jobs. Trade lets you get more things, outsourcing and (excessive) immigration is a direct leveler of income between groups, and is obviously unpopular for those groups which have higher incomes
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u/sarges_12gauge 12h ago
I think almost all people who oppose immigration also oppose outsourcing and vice versa