The Zume Pizza company of Mountain View, California, announced recently that it has sliced labor expenses by half through its implementation of robot chefs in the kitchen.

It’s helpful when a business tells the public straightaway in dollar terms how much money it is saving by ditching human employees and replacing them with robots. Zume owners chatter about “co-bots” aka collaborative robots but clearly that’s just a ploy when the company says elsewhere that the machines are brought in to cut costs, period.

A new Silicon Valley start-up, Zume aims to grab part of the multi-billion-dollar pizza business by delivering freshly baked pies from its oven-containing trucks that finish the cooking process.

Zume also touts its robot additions to pizza production back in the kitchen, which is the direction fast food is going anyway.

The demands of workers for increased wages have speeded the introduction of automation in the business, starting with money-saving kiosks for ordering food. The ordering kiosks are merely industrial-sized tablets (table-versions have been in use for a while); meanwhile the robot industry has more complex machines in the pipeline.

Former CEO of McDonald’s Ed Rensi remarked last spring about the new restaurant technology: “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry — it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries . . . it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe.”

In the video following, one of the Zume founders explained that the money saved from automating production is then put into more healthful ingredients. Right. How secure do the human bakers feel in such an environment?

This application of automation underlines the fact that low-skilled, repetitive jobs are disappearing rapidly. As a result, America does not need to continue immigrating millions of uneducated, unemployable foreigners, particularly with more than 90 million citizens not engaged in the labor force. But low-skill foreigners are exactly the sort crossing Obama’s open southern border all the time.

Remember,

Automation makes immigration obsolete

in restaurants, just like everywhere else.