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by Harley Sorensen
It all started with Joe, any old Joe.
Joe was a decent fellow, a businessman, a good citizen, a wonderful neighbor. But he was having a hard time making a profit. Oh, sure, he was worth a few million, but he could have been worth a lot more if labor costs weren't so high. And those unions!
So, one day, Joe got a bright idea. "Those people in Arkansas and Tennessee and South Carolina will work for a lot less than my employees," he thought, "so why don't I move my business down there?"
And that's what he did. Good-bye, Detroit, hello, Charlotte. Sure, he offered to take his employees with him when he moved, but they'd have to agree to work for half their former wages. None went.
About the same time Joe made his move, Geno began to wonder why he was freezing his butt off in Duluth and paying big bucks to ship his frozen foods all over the country. "I could save big transportation bucks if I moved my operation to Ohio," Geno thought, and so he did. Duluth wept. The folks there had lost a folk hero, and the town's best employer.
Meanwhile, the iron-mining companies pried the very last shred of iron ore out of the ground in northern Minnesota, so they left with an eye on Venezuela, which hadn't been raped yet.
The iron-mining companies were following the fine example set by the logging companies, which around the turn of the 20th century chopped down every virgin pine in Minnesota and then left.
Now those companies are chopping down Northern California, Oregon and Washington.
Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Joe's competitors were envious. And they were hurting. Not only was Joe raking in the big profits Down South, but he left behind a bunch of unemployed people who couldn't afford to buy anything anymore.
They hated to do it, but Joe's competitors finally caved in and joined Joe in the land of mint juleps, no unions and low wages. It was around that time that people started calling the northeastern part of the United States the Rust Belt.
The arrival of his competitors in the "right to work" states made Joe a little uneasy. It wouldn't be long before they'd be able to compete with him again, and even though he was now a multimillionaire many times over, he wanted to see just how big a fortune he could rack up before he died.
Joe made a little economic progress when he learned that people who snuck into the United States from Mexico would work for even less than the Southerners he was exploiting, so he canned his American crews and replaced them with people with Hispanic surnames. Then, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty for Mexicans living illegally in the United States, thus encouraging other Mexicans to flood across the border. In his signing message, Reagan said that from now on, employers who hired illegal immigrants would be held accountable. They'd go to jail. (Wink, wink.)
Joe and his fellow entrepreneurs had a good laugh over that one, and he learned Spanish. And, on one of his trips to Mexico, Joe learned that Mexicans working in Mexico are paid a lot less than Mexicans working in the United States, so he did what comes naturally: He moved his manufacturing plants to Mexico.
And so it went, with Joe and all his competitors and men and women in other businesses. The grass really was greener on the other side of the border, and it proved to be greener yet on the other side of the ocean.
American jobs moved south, then further south, then all over the planet. The hot spot now is
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