A friend of mine's son works in Asia for a major American corporation whose name and logo are known to all. The friend, Bill, and I were discussing the issue of American jobs leaving the country. Bill's argument went like this:

Our unemployment rate is way down: 4-5%; bringing those jobs back would cause the rate to drop even further, wage-push inflation would return to jack up the cost of living and everything. Not good says Bill, sounding like his son, the son's boss and Pat Buchanan all together. No mean feat that.

Bill has a point but it's rather like a half-truth. First, though, let's dispel the Big Myth of "Americans Won't Do that Kind of Work". Sure they will and they do. What its proponents are really saying is this: white Americans won't do that kind of work. In Los Angeles, where I live, one rarely sees a white-American busboy; casual laborers are invariably hispanic or black. (Last time I checked, blacks were American and, in California, there are more hispanic Americans than any other kind of American.) So there is kind of implied racist superiority underlying the myth so readily mouthed.

How, though, is the myth explained? One reason for the myth's apparent truth is the pay scale. Try this experiment in Los Angeles: offer busboy work at $35 per hour and see if a wholly different group doesn't apply for "work Americans won't do". Another myth-breaker: go to middle-America and see what jobs (white) Americans actually do. In Salt Lake City, where there are essentially no blacks or hispanics to do the "work Americans won't do", somebody does it. I wonder who? The myth is just that: a myth.

That said, there is an element of concern about certain jobs leaving the country. There is not and should not be any concern about no-skill jobs seeking the lowest paying unskilled labor. That's capitalism, good for the consumer and, in exported job cases, helpful to the host country's economy. It is of little concern to Americans that minimum wage type work is exported; it takes nothing to bring it back if we need or want to as, by definition, anyone can do it.

What is of concern is when skilled jobs leave the country. In today's business world and increasingly so, skill is the key word. That means not just worker skills but management skills, and at every level. Those skills may be re-acquired once exported but only over time and, in many instances, over fairly long periods of time. Thus, skilled work, once exported, is difficult to bring home.

So when clothing production, shoe making and other low-skill work goes to Timbuktu, let it go and don't worry. But when skilled labor wants to move, work like crazy to keep it home. We may need it some day and it doesn't repatriate.