What happens to immigrants if their labor is no longer needed, as robots rise to take their jobs?

I've you've ever seen a video of an Amazon fulfillment center in action, you're aware of how automated blue-collar work has become. Sure, there are people collating items and putting the finishing touches on packages, but for the size of the warehouse and whir of activity, you'd be forgiven if you overlooked the single human in sight operating a forklift.


A huge modern online retail company like Amazon couldn't operate at the level it does these days with less efficient, more costly, fully human-staffed fulfillment warehouses.

That idea can be extrapolated into the future, as automation expands in technological sophistication and begins to creep into any job. Robots -- seen in the Amazon warehouses essentially as parts of a giant beehive -- can be programmed and designed to do anything.

Robot Take-Over

Will all blue collar jobs -- landscaping, construction, farm labor and warehouse work -- eventually be replaced by automation?

That's the question Vice explored with Steven Bender, a law professor and associate dean for research at Seattle University. Bender -- an ironic last name for someone in this field as "Futurama" fans would tell you -- expects the future of robotics in the U.S. to be harsh economically on newly-arrived, low-skilled immigrant labor. This could only compound the current political pressure on this group coming from Donald Trump's insurgent Republican candidacy.

In the near future, automation may move into the labor field that immigrants normally lay exclusive claim to due to their circumstances.

"Our economy is addicted to precarious and cheap labor, so we rely on Mexicans for dangerous and monotonous jobs, from crop picking to baby butt-wiping, to slaughter houses, to steep roof repairs, to unwashed dishes," Bender said.

Due to the structure of our economy, automation will fill the types of jobs that the U.S. currently outsources for lower labor costs across the world. Many of those jobs may also become scarce for human hands.

"We outsource the work that we can," said Bender. "Whether it's in a maquiladora on the U.S.-Mexican border manufacturing heavy goods, or it's the same factories in Guatemala, and the Caribbean, and Asia manufacturing lighter goods like apparel."

The First Jobs to Go

In the U.S., Bender pointed to early successes and development being spurred right now in agricultural technology as a sign of things to come.

"Technology has replaced a number of jobs, and there's a great deal of research being done in the agricultural industry for the development of technology that can pick certain crops, and obviously that was transformative for the cotton industry," said Bender, adding that, at least currently, "for certain crops like grapes, it's very difficult to engineer a machine that has the delicacy of the human hand and the human eye in terms of what to pick."

"But it's likely those technologies will eventually come to fruition," he concluded.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that automation replaces some jobs on the lowest rung of the labor market, filling roles that people only work when they have no other options.

As Bender explained, "One of the things we have to think about is whether that's actually a good thing in some ways, because of all the dangerous conditions in the field. We've never really progressed from dangerous migrant farm labor conditions, with pesticide-laden workers in sweltering fields."

Robotic automation across the labor market is a real possibility. If robots arrive in force, they will disrupt the exact community least protected from the economic fallout.

Related