A powerful industry demands special treatment. Its executives promise national prosperity. Its lobbyists warn that resistance will only help a foreign rival. And ordinary Americans are told to accept the costs because that’s what the free market requires.
That was the argument behind NAFTA and decades of offshoring. Corporate America shipped jobs overseas and hollowed out communities that had supported American manufacturing for generations in search of cheaper labor. When companies couldn’t move the work abroad, they pushed for more guest workers and looked the other way when illegal immigration expanded the supply of cheap labor.
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