It will be interesting to see how effective President Trump can be in bringing jobs back to America through reducing regulation, renegotiating bad trade deals, lowering corporate taxes and creating a more business-friendly environment. The process will be a good measure of how much automation has undermined employment for American workers.

Some reshoring has already occurred because US-based robots are often cheaper than inexpensive human workers in China or Mexico, particularly given transportation costs. For more troublesome details, see my 2014 blog ”Manufacturing Is Returning to US, but Automation Means Fewer Hires”.

And as reported here earlier this month, recent research found that ”Automation Is a Worse Cause of Factory Job Loss Than Bad Trade Deals”. It is concerning that nobody in Washington of either party is discussing the long-term job threat that smart machines pose. Manufacturing is going gangbusters now in the United States, only more efficiently because of automation (U.S. factories still thriving, but robots mean fewer workers, San Jose Mercury, Nov 3, 2016):

America has lost more than 7 million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Yet American factory production, minus raw materials and some other costs, more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion last year, according to the Commerce Department, which uses 2009 dollars to adjust for inflation. That’s a notch below the record set on the eve of the Great Recession in 2007. And it makes U.S. manufacturers No. 2 in the world behind China.

Experts warn that the machines will soon be performing tasks that once required human workers. The Gartner analytical company predicts that one-third of jobs will be performed by robots by 2025 , and that trend goes beyond manufacturing to cognitive tasks like financial analysis and medical diagnostics. A 2013 report from Oxford University researchers estimated that “nearly half of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to computerization” in less than 20 years. A report this year from the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, found that 59 percent of manufacturing work could be automated in the next decade.

Below, robots build Tesla cars in Fremont, California.

And of course, given automation’s destruction of jobs for American workers, Washington’s generous-to-foreigners immigration policies must end, because…

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

Rice University Professor Moshe Vardi, who is widely quoted in the article below, warns that automation will create a world “dystopia” of mass unemployment

Tech geeks chatter about the coming automation juggernaut frequently, but there is little discussion in the big media about it — strange, given the potential for the entire economic system being undermined.