“Latino immigrant workers died on the Baltimore bridge. More will likely rebuild it.”
— CNN, April 4, 2024
“[Hawaii] has too few homegrown construction workers to handle the coming surge in government projects, so labor must be imported.”
— Honolulu Civil Beat, Jan. 3, 2024
I HAVE two other recent U.S. news stories to share. The first was published by The Wall Street Journal on April 12th: “Immigrants in Maine Are Filling a Labor Gap. It May Be a Prelude for the U.S.”
According to the Journal, “Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide.” Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, said their processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy going.”
Nationally, the Journal stated, “immigration is expected to become an increasingly critical source of new workers and economic vibrancy in the coming decades…. Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers.”
At this point, let’s remind ourselves that we’re not talking about a small remote island located in typhoon alley with a small and shrinking population. No. We’re talking about the United States of America, the third largest nation in the world in terms of land area with a population of over 340 million, and where wages are rising and educational and training opportunities are a-plenty.
“I’m very confident that we would not have seen the employment gains we saw last year — and we certainly can’t sustain it — without immigration,” Wendy Edelberg told the Journal. She’s the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from Columbia University.
Says the Journal: “The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.”
The Journal noted that some economists “fret that immigrants will compete against American workers for jobs, particularly those with lower skill levels, which could become a more pressing concern in a weaker employment market. But recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.”
That’s another thing we should also acknowledge. The shortage of workers usually affects only specific occupations, such as those in the construction, caregiving, restaurant and hotel industries. Why? Because Americans — like other citizens of other prosperous nations — have a diverse range of career options to choose from. Many, if not most of them, can go to college and obtain degrees galore, usually in careers that have nothing to do with the construction, caregiving or restaurant and hotel industries.
This is a glaringly obvious fact that many of us prefer to overlook.
We also pretend not to notice that many of the government officials, politicians and concerned citizens who believe that more U.S. qualified workers should apply for construction, caregiving or restaurant and hotel industry jobs are themselves white-collar employees or career bureaucrats who don’t want to walk the talk by applying or training for those jobs or urging their kids to do so.
***
The second recent U.S. news story I want to share highlights, among other things, the ingenuity of American entrepreneurs.
“Here Come the Fast-Food Robots,” which was posted on April 21st by National Review, is about a restaurant that served “high-quality, but shockingly affordable Mediterranean dishes at a food truck park in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood.”
According to NR, “For as little as $6.99, customers could get bowls of Za’atar chicken, shredded lamb, or chickpea falafel served on beds of rice with sauces and sides, including shredded cabbage slaw, hummus, and roasted sweet potatoes and baby button mushrooms.”
The restaurant was called Mezli, and it was a blue and white pod with ordering kiosks on the front and serving stations on the side. It was also a robot created by three Stanford grad students.
NR quoted one Yelp review as saying, “The bad news: Artificial Intelligence is going to kill us. The good news: AI can sure serve up some tasty Mediterranean at a beautiful price.”
Mezli co-founder Alex Kolchinski told NR that “the idea for Mezli came amid the realization that rising labor costs are one reason why food prices at area restaurants were climbing so high.”
Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute in California, believes that the state’s $20 minimum wage will hasten the robot revolution. “Laws like this, policies like this, just don’t leave too many options for businesspeople,” he told NR. “They’re not charities. They’re not here to make sure everybody has a living wage. They are not fountains of wealth that can be tapped into at any time.”
Jackson also said that a “good economy will churn out better jobs, if you let it.”
But most of us would rather not let it.
Mezli, in any case, eventually ran out of money and was dissolved last year. Kolchinski told NR that “working with hardware, rather than software, is operationally intensive, and a ‘very, very, very hard thing to do.’ And it requires money — a lot of it.” Still, “the technology did work, the product did work, and the people did like it a lot.” Moreover, the “tide has turned, this is no longer a question of are robotics coming to the industry,” Jake Brewer, Miso Robotics’ chief strategy officer, told CNBC last year. “It’s a foregone conclusion. The question is at what pace and in what form.”
The “nativists” and “mercantilists” who (mistakenly) believe that economics is a zero-sum game will continue to insist on immigration restrictions and government-mandated wage hikes. But America’s wealth-creators, the ones who prop up the gargantuan federal, state and municipal-level governments, will continue to find ways to obtain the labor they need so they can thrive despite the economically illiterate policies that are popular among voters and are pushed by opportunistic politicians, including those who should know better.
In the CNMI, mindless federal rules are slowly but surely draining the life from what is left of the islands’ post-Covid economy. If this economic decline continues, the result will be fewer U.S. qualified workers employed in the CNMI not more as more and more of them leave the islands and head to jurisdictions where the economy is growing.
Send feedback to editor@mvariety.com
