The Wealth of Nations

The United States is, by all accounts, a very wealthy nation; having somewhere in the area of 30% of the world's monetary wealth, while only having somewhat less than 4.5% of the world's population. Of course, that wealth isn't particularly evenly distributed, but such is the way of things. The United States also has a pretty good natural resource base, although certain resources that are starting to become important to the modern economy are situated in other parts of the world.

And another thing that the United States has an abundance of is people. So many people, in fact, that there's no real need for all of them to be particularly productive. And that's starting to become a problem. I've droned on and on about the fact that the United States doesn't do a particularly good job of educating its citizens to take on jobs that require high levels of skill, when compared to other countries. Which is why the president of the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (commonly known simply as the United Auto Workers) is hoping that President Trump's tariff policies will convince (or coerce, as the case may be) automobile manufacturing companies to move production from other nations back to the United States.

But more broadly, the United States sees no real need to have people doing jobs that are highly suited to them, or to see to it that the workforce as a whole is highly skilled. High levels of unemployment are generally seen as bad for the economy as a whole, but companies are often encouraged to shed workers for any reason they can find, and while those workers are often exhorted to gain new skills and compete to re-enter the job market, the idea that the United States would be better off with people being not only gainfully employed by highly employable is less common than I would have thought it.

To the degree that controls on immigration are understood to be beneficial to American workers, they're designed to prevent competition from the poor, primarily from Latin America, for what is often low-skilled, demanding and/or dirty work; jobs that it it doesn't make sense to educate people for 13 years for. (Especially considering that many of the Americans one finds in such jobs dropped {or were taken} out of school long before that.)

I think that part of it is the idea that if people are kept hungry (figuratively or literally), they'll contribute more to society overall; people love to trot out stories of some or another poor person, who, by dint of hard work (and often, very carefully concealed good fortune) made the transition from rags to riches. Of course, survivorship bias is also hard at work here... people don't bother with the stories of those who can't find a way to make it big.

It's not a particularly efficient system; mainly because it doesn't need to be. The United States can afford to write off a pretty good proportion of the population,and has no compunctions about doing so. But ensuing that these people can be productive, and are putting their educations to the best use would do a lot for the country. Not only in terms of making it wealthier, but happier and more secure, too.