Robots

Automation, Immigration & Protectionism
By Daniel G. Jennings
Sooner or later the United States is going to have to learn to get along without the massive amounts of cheap imports and huge numbers of illegal immigrants that our economy is so dependent upon. Surprisingly, the best solution for this dilemma maybe technology, in particular robotics and automation.
Public opinion against both immigration and free trade has grown to such a level that politicians will have to address it if they want to keep their jobs. Average people feel that free trade and illegal immigration have hurt the country and are demanding a halt. On a more practical level American society and economy can’t continue to function with huge numbers of immigrants pouring in while jobs pour out.
Yet, we do face a labor shortage, there simply aren’t enough people in the US to produce all the goods and services the public demands or do all the jobs. There are also many jobs, particularly dangerous and menial jobs that average Americans won’t do. The immigration proponents are right on this point US citizens aren’t rushing to pick crops, mop floors, flip burgers, change bedpans, swing hammers or do stoop labor.
As the baby boomers get older this problem will get worse because there will be a greater demand for labor and fewer people to do it. Something will have to be done, and allowing unlimited immigration is not the answer. Nor is outsourcing a solution, you can’t send a dirty floor to India to get cleaned.
One partial solution will be provided by technology that is automation and robotics. A lot of the labor now being done by immigrants, legal and illegal can be done by machines. Take car washes, lots of Americans take their vehicles to hand car washes even though automatic car washes can do the job. Or washing the windows of sky scrapers and tall buildings, this can be done by an automatic machine lowered by rope yet many skyscrapers are cleaned by men dangling from ropes. A great many agricultural tasks many of which are now done by immigrants can also be performed by machines.
It is already possible to build robots that clean floors, mow lawns, dig ditches and perform other menial tasks. If we can build robots that roll around on Mars and machine gun terrorists leaders from the air we should be able to build robots that do things like plant and pick crops, dig ditches, trim bushes, stock shelves and do virtually any other kind of labor. Right now you and I can buy robots that vacuum floors and mow lawns why can’t business take advantage of this technology?
This isn’t Star Wars fantasy, Toyota has built robots that walk like people and have hands shaped like human hands. The Japanese auto giant expects to introduce robots capable of doing household labor to the market by 2010. NASA is also working on robots with human shaped hands that can perform basic labor.
Many of you are undoubtedly asking why aren’t we turning to machines to do more of our work? Largely because it’s cheaper for big business to rely upon immigrants and foreign labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build an automatic car wash, when you can buy a couple of hoses, some buckets and a few wash cloths and hire a few illegal immigrants to do the work? Why buy an expensive machine to pick crops when you can hire a few dozen immigrants to do the work for a few hours and pay them nothing? Why automate your factory when you can ship it over to China and have poor Chinese do the work for a pittance?
This reliance upon cheap labor slows or even halts progress. There is no incentive to develop new technologies to do the work. No incentive to develop machines to mop floors, clean cars, mow lawns or pick crops. No incentive to automate our factories so we can produce the goods we need without relying upon cheap foreign labor.
Our technology and industry are being set back decades by this reliance on manual labor both in foreign factories and on our shores. Notice that Toyota, a company based in a country with tight restrictions on immigration, Japan, is developing robots. America will find itself shut out of what will surely be a vast new industry in the 21st industry because of the greed of our business leaders and politicians.
American business is more than capable of automating when it needs to or wants to. There are now automated check out lines in libraries and grocery stores and automated gas pumps. This is happening because it is just too expensive to hire cashiers and have them on duty all the time.
If we were to say no to illegal immigration and cheap foreign labor we would force industry to increase its use of existing automation and robotics technologies and develop new robots and machines to do the work. This would make our industry more modern and efficient and give America a vast technological edge on its global competitors. More importantly it might lead to something unprecedented in human history, a civilization not based upon the exploitation of the labor of the less fortunate.