Joe Biden is starting to panic — and not just because of his dwindling approval ratings. More than 18 months since Covid struck, the shocking dependence of the United States on fragile global supply chains — and the corresponding absence of a functional manufacturing system — has been exposed.
The White House has responded with talk of creating more “robust” supply chains and reviving American manufacturing with its “Build Back Better” agenda. But if Biden is serious about addressing these issues, he needs to understand that this is a decades-long process, unlikely to be fully fixed during his presidency.
Even then, victory isn’t guaranteed. At every step there will be efforts to undermine his attempts by a slew of powerful interests, particularly those US corporations who have based their decisions to outsource manufacturing on narrow short-term profitability concerns, at the expense of acknowledging the strategic value of basing factories at home. And now America is paying the price.
Yet many of the same executives who now bemoan the lack of skilled labour in the US are themselves the architects of this very problem. Unlike their Japanese and German competitors, American firms have repeatedly underestimated the value of integrating their product-design and manufacturing processes. This poses a major barrier for newcomers, particularly in high-end industries such as semiconductors and biotech, as moving part of the the production overseas not only degrades the quality of the product (see Intel as an example), but also enhances the possibility of intellectual property theft.
At home, the impact of decades of offshoring and outsourcing jobs is impossible to ignore: manufacturing plants have been shuttered or scaled back, while many former employees have moved on to other jobs or simply retired. Young people, too, are opting for other careers, while, starved of students, many community colleges and vocational schools have scaled back their technical programmes.
Many business leaders, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have issued calls for increased immigration to solve the skills gap. But what kind of immigration? Right now in the US, we have an increasingly odd alliance defending today’s dysfunctional status quo. Both the libertarian Right and, increasingly, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party decry restrictions on immigration — the former because it shuts off an increasing source of cheap serf labour, the latter because they view such immigration restrictions as motivated by xenophobia (and also see the new immigrants as a source of long-term political support for their party). Meanwhile, political gridlock has precluded the shift toward a more coherent skills-based immigration policy, as opposed to the plethora of unskilled migrants now flooding the southern border.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe