Every Donald Trump revival meeting includes his shout-out to the audience to say that Mexico will pay for the wall. Compare that to the recent news about United Technologies transferring more than 2,000 jobs to Mexico, where $20-an-hour labor will be replaced by $3-an-hour labor. In one company meeting, we lost more jobs than any physical wall will stop in years.
While we talk about border patrols and 50-foot walls, the real bleeding of jobs takes place in phone calls and on plane rides to countries that have labor rates that are a fraction of ours. Of course, solving this problem will offend businesses that pay for the campaigns of those who vote the rules.
Unfortunately, we have taught countries around the world to be great free-enterprise geographies. They have figured out that the way they compete is with cheap labor. And once a U.S. company has built an expensive factory in Mexico or Southeast Asia, it is very expensive to move those jobs home to America. So let's at least start talking about the real reasons for job loss, not one that can be solved with a chant at a political rally.
Michael Emerson, Eden Prairie
DRUG SENTENCING
Proposed reforms are modest, yet legislator rejects them
State Rep. Tony Cornish seems to be digging into a foolish position by opposing the already-underwhelming reforms for the sentencing of drug offenders here in Minnesota ("Sentencing changes get pushback," Feb. 23). We need to be looking further at this issue and finding both common ground and common sense to further reform our system, not keep it as draconian and out of sync as it is with other states.
It seems clear to me that the current approach to the war on drugs has resulted in complete failure. We have not realized any meaningful decrease in usage, nor have public health and safety been improved. All we have to show are billions spent and the largest population of inmates on Earth. We should look toward Portugal, where decriminalization and controls have reduced overdose deaths and addiction rates, as well as toward states like Colorado and Washington, which have decided to tax and regulate cannabis like alcohol. State Sen. Ron Latz seems to get this, and his efforts are appreciated.
I would like to see the Legislature go further. It is time to both regulate cannabis as a safer alternative to alcohol and treat our drug problem as a health, not a criminal, issue.
Chris Kurle, Brooklyn Park
RACE AND DISPARITY
Don't forget about society's responsibility to black fathers?
After reading a Feb. 21 letter writer's response to the Feb. 14 Opinion Exchange article "Addressing race and disparity: One life at a time, all ideology aside," I was left with the impression that if only black fathers would marry the mothers of their children and try harder, their kids would stay in school and not end up in jail. This myth gets a lot of press, but it isn't the whole story. It's not as if most black men are choosing to leave their kids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a study refuting this common assumption, and it's summarized in a June 8, 2015, New York Times article, "Black Dads are Doing the Best of All."
As a mother and parent educator, I felt such sadness for the untold story of the black men who aren't married to their child's mother but work hard to be good fathers, who were prevented from participating or who lost heart when the barriers to staying involved in their child's life became overwhelming. John Turnipseed with the Center for Fathering at Urban Ventures in Minneapolis was quoted in the reader's response letter: "You want to end gang problems? You want to end kids going to jail? Put a father in their life. That is the single biggest thing." It is also essential to recognize and clearly state that in order to put a black father in a child's life, we need to stop putting him in jail unnecessarily and start making sure that society provides access to a quality education and the job opportunities he needs to support his children.
