The world is changing
There's a well-documented rural flight taking place in this country. Rural populations are in decline as jobs dry up and younger generations search elsewhere to find a hopeful future. In 2013, 60% of rural counties shrank in population. Many rural towns are dying a slow death. It's easy to imagine someone who’s lived in the same town his entire life. He's worked hard. He's paid his bills on time. He's done everything right. Then one day he wakes up and he's been laid off from his job because the factory he worked at moved to Mexico. His house has been foreclosed upon because the housing market collapsed and he didn't read the fine print in his mortgage. It's easy to see how unfair that would seem to someone who’d gotten up at 5am every morning to do a physically hard job. After putting in years of hard work without complaint, to suddenly find yourself with nothing to show for it.
There's a great deal of pain being experienced in rural America. The recovery from the Great Recession was primarily focused on America's cities. Rural America continues to feel the effects of the Great Recession despite data showing that the unemployment rate is near a 43-year low nationally. You can get a feeling for how much pain rural America is in when you consider that the opioid epidemic has hit rural America hardest. Addiction obviously has a lot of causes, but it's quite symbolic that much of rural America is literally overdosing on pain killers. Is the pain that’s being treated a general feeling of malaise? A feeling that the American Dream is slipping away from them?
The unfortunate reality is that those jobs aren't coming back. Globalization is a one way street and there's no going back to how things were. Virtually all economists agree that the benefits of free trade outweigh the effects on employment, but that fact may not be comforting to someone who just lost their job. There are obvious winners and losers in trade deals, and the losers are almost always blue-collar workers while the winners are multinational corporations and Wall Street investors.
Free trade is a seismic change taking place in the world, but there's another reason why there's no going back to the way things were. The reason is that we live in a (mostly) free market capitalist society, and some industries just don't make financial sense in the 21st century. It's not cost-effective to mine coal anymore. There are cheaper energy sources available that are also renewable, and do less damage to the environment. Companies stopped mining coal for financial reasons, acting in their own self-interest, and forcing them back into the business would be anti-capitalist.
It's important for politicians to talk honestly about how life will have to change, even if it's difficult to hear. One family may have done the same job for three generations, but that job might just not exist anymore. Another family may be forced to move to another town to find work, even though it's heartbreaking to have to leave the town you grew up in. That's the reality of the current situation and it doesn't help anyone to pretend that we can go back to a more nostalgic time
One of the worst things that we can do is to blame immigration for the negative effects of globalization. First of all, it's simply not true, because it's been shown over and over again that the effects of immigration on the U.S. economy are broadly positive. Second, it's misplacing blame, because multinational corporations are the ones benefiting from globalization, so you can bet they're the ones lobbying hardest for it. Third, it creates hostility towards people who have done nothing wrong other than striving to create better lives for themselves and their families. That being said, globalization does come at a cost, and that's where society (i.e. government) can and should step in to help people who have been negatively impacted. That help could come in the form of job training, financial assistance, or education assistance. But to get to that point, there needs to be a certain level of acceptance of the ways in which the world is changing.