The immigration debate...

I'm going to talk politics for a minute. I know I usually stay out of it, but Jim Pinto's comments in his recent enewsletter (www.jimpinto.com) decided me that it was as relevant in a process automation blog as in any other forum. Pinto says he marched. I say I would have marched too, except I'm sick. I'm hoping to be able to march on May 1. I'll be in San Francisco for the OSISoft 25th Anniversary Forum, that day. I've written a lot about outsourcing and the globalization of the world economy. Many of you agree with me, many of you don't. The fact is, the economy of the world's corporations has been global for over a generation. None of the Fortune 1000 will tell you different. As far as they are concerned, national interests are inconvenient holdovers from the last century, and they'll go where the money is. The problem is that the workforce isn't global. Not yet. I've written about that, too. I've said that it is only a matter of time before the tsunami of parity rolls all the way around the world. Workers in India are now getting close to parity (adjusted for cost of living) with workers in the first world. That is, knowledge workers. Those are the ones whose skills are the most portable. But what about the poor worker in a third world country? Why do thousands of Mexican and other Latin American and South American workers cross the US border every day? Why do thousands of Chinese workers smuggle themselves into Canada and the United States annually? They have no way to join the knowledge workers in achieving parity in their home countries...their economies are not deep enough. So they come here, so that their children will have those opportunities. My maternal grandparents came to the USA from Italy in 1903. Neither spoke English. Both of them spoke Italian all their lives, preferentially. My grandfather, Stefano Martini, raised his family, fed his family, and lived and died in the USA. I do not know if he ever became a citizen. My grandmother, Marietta Martini, did become a citizen. In 1903, in the Santa Clara Valley (long before Silicon) Italians were the "wops" who picked the crops, worked in the fields, worked in the canneries, and cleaned the houses. Now, in Silicon Valley, those jobs are held by Mexicans, mostly undocumented. In the 19th century, we discriminated against Poles, Irish, Italians, other immigrants, because they "would change our way of life." Well, the pot melted and they (we) are all Americans now. Even the 'native americans' aren't really. They came over the landbridge from Siberia earlier than my grandparents came through Ellis Island. We are all immigrants here. In 1903, the requirements to come to the USA were so much less stringent that a man and woman from Italy could just get on a boat and come to America, looking for a better life. My other grandfather, Joseph Denim Boyes, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He emigrated to Canada with his family in the 1890s and came down to the USA to work on the railroad in Idaho. Eventually he became a citizen of the USA. He married a girl, Grace Barr, whose family was Pennsylvania Dutch. That means they were immigrants from Germany. They crossed the country in a covered wagon, looking for opportunity. Between them, they raised eight children, including a ferry boat captain, a wizard with neon light, and my father, who went to work for Brown Instruments in 1940 and bequeathed to me the world of automation. None of my grandparents were ever told they couldn't come here. We were the land of opportunity, then. We should still be the land of opportunity, now. Instead of building an automated fence around the lower border of the United States, we ought to be inviting everyone in. If you look at the contributions to arts, letters, science and engineering made by immigrants to the United States over the past 400 years, the amount of innovation is staggering. Without those immigrants, there would not BE a United States, as we know it. What does this mean for process automation? Where are we going to get those younger workers I've been talking about, that we need, and for lack of whom jobs are already going begging? That's right. You guessed it.