“Cheap labor,” according to Vice President JD Vance, “inhibits innovation” and is “a drug that too many American firms got addicted to” over previous decades of globalization.
“Whether we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration shift system,” Vance continued, “cheap labor became the drug of Western economies.”
Vance’s latest remarks on labor and immigration formed part of his opening keynote address to the American Dynamism Summit on Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C. Vance analyzed cheap labor’s impact on the American economy to challenge the apparent notion that there are irreconcilable differences between the “techno-optimist and the populist Right of President Trump’s coalition.”
“As a proud member of both tribes,” Vance told the crowd that he believes the idea of a divide between these two camps of Trump’s coalition is “based on a faulty premise” that technology and labor are inherently at odds.
To dispel this notion, the vice president described the relationship between high-end innovation and board-based prosperity, which, in part, explains the underlying motivation for both camps unifying under Trump’s leadership.
“In any dynamic society, technology is going to advance,” Vance acknowledged. “When we innovate, we do sometimes cause labor market disruptions.”
However, he also insisted that “technology should be something that enhances rather than supplants the value of labor.”
“The history of American innovation is that we try to make people more productive, and then we increase their wages,” the vice president said.
Vance encouraged the audience “not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation.” Rather, “both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today, have the same enemy. The solution, I believe, is American innovation, because in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labor.”
“The fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country,” Vance said. “For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor, both overseas and by importing it into our own country. And we got lazy. We overregulated our industries instead of supporting them, we overtaxed our innovators instead of making it easier for them to build their great companies, and we made it way too hard to build things and invest in things in the United States of America.”
But all that “stopped two months ago,” the vice president said.
