>>The first sentence is code for "it's an employer's market"
>It's always an employer's market if you let people tell you that it is.

It's not an employer's market now- business is having to "wave the magic wand" to offer jobs to the unemployables. Next: your Irish example shows what happens when the devil is denied idle hands. My pick is that if employment picks up in the generational wastelands of Baltimore, Chicago and other depressed city centres, you'll see a dramatic reduction in violent crime too. Except maybe for drugs. The new drug culture may be irredeemable.

>>One of the big lies that pervades our culture is that someone is lucky to have a job.

If there's 10 applicants clamoring to compete on price, you *are* lucky to have a job. The problem for honorable employers wanting to give preference to locals is that if competitors find sneaky low price alternatives, you'll be priced out of the market unless you follow suit. If your competitor starts outsourcing to China for 40% of the local cost landed, you can go broke or you can eliminate your own workforce too. Similarly, farmers with illegals. Ditto professional firms and H-1b visaholders eager for $10K less than your kids' salaries. So who does it benefit to advocate more of that rather than reversing the benefit- e.g. so that illegal employment practice draws huge fines? You need only look at the Mississippi chicken farmers whose illegal workforces were apprehended earlier this year, forcing them to employ locals again. But penalties? If they feared a huge fine, the situation may never have eventuated. The irony is that all this is rationalized by lower prices for consumers but actually it usually makes only pennies difference in the long term and almost all the benefit goes in predictable direction.

>>Labor, like many other groups, has suffered from a lack of inspired leadership.
>>Woolworth's quickly integrated its lunch counters in the south when black people stopped spending in its stores.
>>Bus companies jettisoned Jim Crow policies when black people started walking to work.
>>Those things happened because of inspired leadership.

Perhaps. Maybe not just "made in the USA" but "by proud US citizens" will become an equally effective social lever. Will it be Biden advocating that, or HRC when she finally shows her hand?