Free Trade FAQ's

The Center for Trade Policy Studies ^ | Unknown | Unknown

[FITZ]

Then again, my bloodline is through Monroe. Hence the FR name.

Look at countries like Mexico ---- 10% of those people are doing very very well ---exceedingly well in fact. But they have a third world country where 80% of the people live in poverty. The other 10% are doing so-so. We had a country where almost everyone was doing quite well --- that was what the Founding Fathers wanted.

[dogbyte12]

I think what many people don't understand is that there are a large class of people who will never be prepared for anything other than semi skilled unskilled work through no fault of their own.

If you were born with an IQ of 90, you are low normal. You have a high school diploma, but you struggled through school, you are able, willing to work with some training, and there were jobs for you.

These people can not go to college and get into the latest greatest high tech field. It's not available to them. There was entry level manufacturing work for people like this in the past, that paid them for sweat, more than for their brains. They did fine. Telling a person with a masters degree in Computer Engineering that he has to now get a degree in say plasma screen tech, is a burden and a chore, but it is something they can do.

If you are not God given the ability to do that though, your options in the global market are rapidly shrinking however. The Joe Six packs of this country are about to take a punch to the diaphragm and nobody has any good answers as to what can or should be done about it.

[FITZ]

If you were born with an IQ of 90, you are low normal. You have a high school diploma, but you struggled through school, you are able, willing to work with some training, and there were jobs for you.

Yes --- for all those with IQs of 110, there are that many with IQs of 90, and for all those with IQs of 120, there are that many with IQs of 80 and so on. Plus what people forget too is that many of the NAFTA displaced workers living off welfare the rest of their lives are immigrants who came here with no job skills, never learned English and consider themselves too old now to ever learn anything ---many are only 40 ---- so if they live another 50 years, it's going to 50 years on welfare.

In addition to that ----we taking in millions of unemployed and destitute and uneducated from Mexico and more and more from Brazil ---- obviously farms aren't adding millions of new acres in farmlands ---- and American farms are increasingly mechanized ----so what kind of jobs will there be? Politicians keep talking about amnesty and open borders ----- so what do they think is going to provide for all these newcomers?

[SteveH]

Look at countries like Mexico ---- 10% of those people are doing very very well ---exceedingly well in fact. But they have a third world country where 80% of the people live in poverty. The other 10% are doing so-so.

Although it seems economists wearing free-trade rose colored glasses would look at this and say that the average standard of living, GDP, etc. in Mexico is rising, and therefore free trade must be a success.

[FITZ]

That would take some real rose-colored glasses, because Mexico is doing worse. Those millions of indigent people moving over the border every year once had jobs, homes, and lives in Mexico. You don't see that level of migration unless things are quite bad. People don't just abandon homes and their way of life by the millions ---- they've lost those jobs and homes.

[judywillow]

Is immigration bad for average Americans?

Immigration has been good for the US economy and the average American worker. Foreign-born workers fill gaps in the labor force where demand is greatest,

I take it the guy who wrote this doesn't know about California, or is using some sort of a map of the country from before Louis and Clark??