You don’t see many news reports like this one where a relative few human jobs are lost when smart machines are brought in.

I suspect there are many more instances of a few dozen job cuts here and there that never make it to the newspapers or internet. It’s just the company upgrading equipment to become more efficient, so it’s not really news. But the effect of technological unemployment is cumulative and is at least partly responsible for the jobless recovery.

There probably aren’t many optical production specialists flooding across the Rio Grande to steal American jobs. Still, the jobs universe is shrinking enormously because of automation, so it is foolish for the United States to continue with immigration of any legality as a normal government policy. We should end immigration because it has become obsolete — like homesteading, which was stopped after the west was settled.