Trump’s No. 1 lie about Mexico and U.S. jobs

(Photo: Rich Pedroncelli – AP)

One of Donald Trump’s most misleading campaign themes is that Mexico is stealing U.S. jobs, and that Washington should re-negotiate or scrap its free trade deal with Mexico to prevent even larger job losses. In reality, what’s threatening U.S. jobs isn’t Mexico, but automation.

I thought a lot about Trump’s deceptive trade proposals this week while visiting Oxford University to interview the co-author of a much-cited Oxford-Martin School study on the future of employment. The study says 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of disappearing over the next twenty years because of automation.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne looked at 702 jobs listed by the U.S. Department of Labor, and ranked them according to their likelihood of being replaced by computer programs and robots. Since the study’s publication in late 2013, its conclusions “have only been further validated, ” Osborn told me.

In essence, almost every job that is mechanical, or follows a physical or intellectual routine, is likely to disappear in the near future, the authors say.

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