Penn faculty comment about some of the issues raised in the Philadelphia Inquirer series, "America: Who Stole the Dream?"

Professor of Sociology Douglas S. Massey --

* "Immigrants did not cause the mess we're in. Immigration is a symptom rather than an underlying cause."

* "If we're in a global economy, one way or another, we're competing globally. If we don't bring the immigrants here, business will close plants here and send them overseas to take advantage of the cheaper labor. So it's better if we bring the immigrants here and keep the jobs here."

* "International corporations and financiers operate on a global scale, but countries that regulate them have to deal with them on a national scale. So the corporations have an upper hand. They will move to where conditions are best. They can play countries off of eachother."

Associate Professor of Economics Patrick Kehoe --

* "Three things are going on:

"One, there's a long-term movement out of manufacturing toward services. The trend in the United States is people losing manufacturing jobs in the last 50 years and getting into services.

"Two, you see a big shift in income distribution. People without higher education are not doing so well, and the wage differential is growing.

"Three, you see skill-biased technical change, with computers helping productivity, but really they help the high-skilled people more. Computers do not help a janitor's productivity. But they do help my productivity. Therefore, technology shifts my wages up, but not the janitor's."

* "We (the United States) need to help people with low skills get more skills. We need better education, job training, and ways to move people from closed mills and to help them find new jobs throughout the country. We should have discussions about this on the national level -- ways to help with the painful transitions that low-skilled workers are curently going through.

* Blaming global issues on NAFTA is ridiculous.

"The United States has to compete with the rest of the world -- Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, China in the future. We've got to concentrate on what we're good at."

* "NAFTA has a big effect on Mexico; it has a tiny effect on the United States."

Wharton Assistant Professor of Management Larry Hunter--

* "We have some really serious problems in the United States. And if we paid attention to them--in particular, increasing inequality and the failure to generate good, high-paying stable jobs to replace the manufacturing jobs that we are losing--we'd be better off.

"We need to increase productivity growth in services and we need to do better on redeploying manufacturing workers into services.

"A lot of people who are being bounced from manufacturing jobs to service jobs are getting clobbered and we're not doing right by them. What are we going to do as a country to make these lower-level service jobs better jobs?"

Return to Compass Features for September 17, 1996