Is it inconsistent for JD Vance to embrace industrial automation while opposing low-wage migration? Yes, it is, according to a number of his critics in response to the Vice President’s remarks on robotics in an interview with Fox News. But those critics couldn’t be more wrong.

“No robot can replace a great blue-collar construction worker,” Vance told Fox News last week. “You see some of the houses, some of the things they can do, the trim they can do — there’s an art there that no robot can replace. But can a robot maybe make it easier for a construction worker to put more nails in more walls over a shorter period of time?”

Vance said that yes, industrial automation can enhance the productivity of human workers. And that was enough to send the classical liberal and neoliberal corners of the internet into a gotcha-bro frenzy.

In a much-circulated YouTube segment, for example, the Australian economist Justin Wolfers wondered why Vance is comfortable with productivity-enhancing robots, even as he’s emerged as one of the most restrictionist voices in the Trumpian orbit. “JD Vance’s workplace of the future sounds terrific,” Wolfers noted. “There’s American workers, and there are these two-legged robots walking around and helping them be more productive, doing the work the American workers don’t want to do.”

He went on: “Here’s the thing: what if that two-legged robot was named José and was a person? What if he was an immigrant? All of a sudden, JD Vance thinks that’s a terrible horrific future.” What’s more, “he’s totally comfortable with robots coming in to help Americans do the jobs Americans won’t do,” Wolfers said, “but the moment they’re ethnic, they’re foreign […] this is the worst thing that can happen to American workers.”

Isn’t Vance inconsistent for wanting robotic productivity gains, but not those made possible by low-wage, low-skilled migrant workers?

This isn’t the slam dunk Wolfers thinks it is. To see why, it helps to remember that technology is the chief driver of efficiency gains and the force that makes possible transitions from less advanced to more advanced modes of production. But the reason firms turn to automation in the first place is to save on the cost of labour. Hence, labour-saving technology, or LST.

As Karl Marx observed, “like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities” by reducing human labour time. It follows that, as long as firms can find cheap labour — whether in the form of migrants in construction, or by offshoring to China and Vietnam in manufacturing — they have few incentives to take up LST.

This is why, for example, agriculture in the American North mechanised much more rapidly than did Southern agriculture in the 19th century. The North didn’t have access to an army of unpaid labour — slaves — and was thus spurred to automate. The South, with its Peculiar Institution and, later, anti-union politics, remained industrially backward until relatively recently.

The neoliberal regime Vance opposes has brought about just such technological stagnation on a national scale, and things won’t change for as long as José and his friends are there to toil more cheaply than it would cost to transition to the next stage of labour-saving technology.

So no, there is no inconsistency between embracing robotics and automation on one hand, and opposing low-skilled migration on the other. Indeed, the latter is a precondition of bringing about the former.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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