Richard Kaplan, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says its time to stop blaming immigration or trade agreements for the loss of jobs in Texas and across the country, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Kaplan told a business group in San Antonio that narrative may have been true 15 ot 20 years ago, but not today."I think today, though, it is often, not always but often, far more likely that job losses being suffered by workers in certain industries, is much more due to technology enabled disruption than it is to globalization," Kaplan said.
Kaplan says if a job is being lost today, it is far more likely that the job is being lost due to robotics or technological advances than to immigrants taking jobs, or trade policies moving jobs overseas.
Kaplan cited the photography industry. He says fifteen years ago, companies like Kodak were among the biggest and most powerful in the country. Today, the vast majority of those jobs are gone. He says those job losses were completely due to the rise of technology in the form of digital photography and cameras being appended to smart phones. He says not a single job in that industry was shipped overseas due to NAFTA or taken by an illegal immigrant.
Much of the rhetoric on both sides in the 2016 elected centered on narratives that the now scuttled Trans Pacific Partnership, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, or other trade deals which candidate Donald Trump called 'bad for the United States' were responsible for losses of jobs in traditional manufacturing.
One of the narratives driving the immigration debate is a claim that immigrants enter the U.S. illegally and steal jobs from hard working American citizens.Kaplan says believing those narratives is dangerous.
"If we mistakenly attribute some of these job losses to globalization, we may actually make decisions from a policy point of view that could make us be even less competitive, create more job losses, and make poor policy decisions."
Kaplan told the Texas Business Leadership Council that consistently the biggest problem employers tell him they face today isn't pressure to ship more jobs overseas or a temptation to hire illegal immigrants who can do the work cheaper. It is a lack of people with the technological skills needed to fill the jobs which are currently available in their companies.