No argument there. We have a government run by Corporate America under the guise of a Two-Party system.
why does business want cheap labor? business needs cheap labor so they can compete on a local,state,national,international scale. America is in a global market and is competing against countries like china, japan ,Taiwan, southamerica, e.u, and the pacific rim countries and they all pay pennies on the dollar for wages.
Aye, there's the rub. I would argue mentioning the EU though as their wages equal or exceed ours in the majority of cases. I have no problem in competing with them, or any country paying near-parity wages. In those cases, we're competing against expertise and innovation and I feel we can hold our own or exceed in that area.
How long can America pay American middle class wages and still compete in the global market?
They can't. That's why we have (or used to have) a middle class and the Third Worlders don't.
dont get me wrong i want the illegals out, and Americans to have good jobs. but our fight is not just illegals its well beyond that,...
Here's where we depart. Our fight IS with the illegals, in part, for under the scenario you provide, if American companies can't export jobs to the low wage countries, they import them via the illegals and H1-Bs. If we ever got to the point of having Americans making the same Third World wages and living in huts, the companies would STILL go overseas because of the benefits.
One poster had a 20-minute YouTube video of an Australian team checking out the labor situation in China. They interviewed one of many people who have contracted silicosis after working in a gem polishing factory. She will be dead in a few years. The factory offered three months wages to the affected workers and booted them out. When the woman went to management for more for her survivors, she was told, "You are incurable. Go away and die." THAT's what we're competing against.
. . . its about rebuilding America.
That ain't gonna happen, under the present regulations. While machinery can be re-imported, the factories to house them have been razed to the ground to save on property taxes. Trying building a new one under the current maze of environmental (read anti-industry) regulations, let alone the others. The transition from a manufacturing (wealth creating) to a service (wealth distributing) economy has doomed the middle class. We are heading for a two-class country with the prols serving the elites. It's taken us 40 years to get this far and the end is not too distant, barring some major political upheaval.
There's a neat rock song called "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades". That title has a ring of irony for todays workers.