As I tune into some of the most prominent voices on the American right wing, I keep hearing all about the need to “bring back” jobs to America. The notion of “American jobs”—be that in the form of bringing outsourced manufacturing jobs back home or in the form of maximizing employment for locals and minimizing it for foreigners—is antithetical to meritocratic free-market capitalism and to American life itself.
There are two distinct interpretations of “American jobs”: one concerns where jobs are located, while the other concerns who gets to fill them. Within such an “Overton Window,” anti-capitalist zealots denounce free trade and immigration as harmful to the health of the American economy and society.
What populists on both sides of the aisle conveniently hide is that the “sacred” act of bringing jobs back home is not good policy after all. A manufacturing-based economy damages the domestic consumer in the form of higher prices due to the higher costs of production, scares off global talent since—under such an economy—“American jobs” would have to go to Americans first, and perpetuates an unmeritocratic economic and political culture where ethnicity and background, not skills and merit, decide who gets hired.
First, the idea that certain inhabitants are entitled to certain jobs simply because they were born in a jurisdiction where others weren’t is inherently unmeritocratic and un-American. The United States was built on the idea of hard work and meritocracy; a country where one did not look at national identity, citizenship, or ethnicity, but rather at dedication and good deeds as criteria for success in life.
When a government authority or a political philosophy makes the claim that, in order for foreigners to be hired, maximum employment for locals must be reached, meritocracy is assaulted at its core. In a meritocratic society, private enterprises decide whom to hire, not the government. That hiring decision takes into consideration skills, ability, labor costs, and so on, not the fringe political whims of bureaucrats.
Therefore, the concept of American jobs for Americans is inherently unmeritocratic and creates a class of entitled workers, driving down competition. The right has rightfully opposed DEI as an unmeritocratic mechanism that steals opportunities from the most deserving and gives them to a handful of racial and ethnic minorities, while supporting DEI-like employment policies for citizens. Jobs reserved only for a category of people are unmeritocratic.
This is the first contradiction within the concept of “American jobs”: employment is treated as an entitlement based on citizenship rather than merit.
Second, bringing jobs back home is neither a viable nor a good policy alternative. Free trade has lowered prices, increased affordability, and strengthened the purchasing power of everyday Americans, whose phones and cars are made in countries with much lower costs of production, making all of those products cheaper for consumers and families to buy.
If many of those polluting and strenuous manufacturing jobs were ever to come back to America—assuming there is a robust labor force willing and able to fill those jobs—everything would jump up in price. Such effects are already tangible to consumers through the inflation caused by reckless tariffs and trade wars, or by some companies choosing to move their operations to the US in order to escape the tariffs.
Needless to say, there are 7 million jobs available that the current workforce is not willing to fill, and companies are having to hire foreign workers to fill those repatriated jobs regardless, defeating the purpose of protectionist economic policies in the first place.
It turns out that creating or bringing “American jobs” back as a distinct political objective, in disregard of the market’s ability to allocate capital the way it sees fit, is political malpractice. The most developed nations in our world today, including the United States and Western European countries, excel in AI, finance, tech, and services.
Manufacturing, coal mining, and other hard-labor jobs are increasingly seen as sectors dominating the economies of second- and third-world countries, whose labor forces are not sufficiently sophisticated or trained for high-end technology, AI, and financial services. The concept of “American jobs” will change the economic structure of the United States into that of a developing nation.
This is the second contradiction: bringing manufacturing jobs back to American soil does not necessarily improve the purchasing power of American consumers, nor does it guarantee that those jobs will be filled by American citizens.
Last, restrictionist immigration policies aimed at “protecting” US workers feed into the false notion that inhabitants of a land or citizens of a country are somehow entitled to the jobs created by the free deployment of capital. It is great when full employment is reached, but in a moral, just, and meritocratic society, the government should have no business dictating the ethnic background of the people hired by private enterprises.
Beyond the meritocratic argument, restrictionist immigration policies also have economic consequences for the workers they supposedly protect.
Even if the concept of “American jobs” were indeed meritocratic, repeated studies show that crackdowns on foreign labor end up reducing job opportunities for native-born citizens. For example, higher levels of international student enrollment in American universities correlate with higher levels of employment for native-born citizens. Crackdowns on CPT, OPT, or H-1B visas do not free up jobs for US citizens; they take those jobs away.
For their part, international students are responsible for the founding of one-fourth of US billion-dollar companies. Elon Musk is a prime example of this, having arrived in America as an international student.
US employers, colleges, and universities are deeply dependent on foreign labor for many structural reasons, and invoking the idea that those jobs belong to Americans ignores a fundamental fact: Most Americans are simply not looking for the jobs that these foreigners do or supposedly “take.”
The notion of “American jobs” is a myth, as it pretends to save American jobs while doing the exact opposite; it damages jobs, consumers, and the economy at large. Both interpretations of “American jobs” ultimately undermine the free-market principles they claim to defend.
