They'd have to calculate unemployment differently there than here, especially away from the urban areas. Here, roughly 5% unemployment is considered full employment because you'll always have a small percentage moving between jobs for one reason or another. If a person living in 3rd world conditions one step from basically living off the land is still feeding their kids are they unemployed? With no social safety net, hundreds of millions of people have to be doing SOMETHING to live, even if they're just scraping by. In their cities and suburbs it'd be easier to calculate but almost impossible to judge the entire country by. If there are half a billion people available to work in factories at a moment's notice, are they all currently unemployed?

 As far as being self-sufficient as nations or a continent go, picture what would happen if, say, Iran finished their nuclear weapons program and some Iranian nutjob fired off a couple of nukes at Israel  AND the US for being pro-Israeli and, say, drinking beer and wearing bikinis? And then China and Russia jump in on the side of the Arabs because of the oil? Suddenly North America has almost no oil in the short term and very little manufacturing capacity because most things are off-sourced to China because they're more efficient and have a virtually unlimited supply of cheap labor? Also consider the hopeless state of North American owned shipping compared to the WWII era if we needed/wanted to move massive amounts of our own goods on and off the continent.  I'm definitely not a doomsdayer but it never hurts to think "what if" every now and then to evaluate what position we're really putting ourselves in case something truly unforeseen or crazy happens.

 For most people reading this, please realize that what I'm posting is mostly because I'm waiting for the snow to stop to go out and clear the yard and that any one of my points can be picked apart. Most of them are exaggerated a bit to make my points clearer, particularly the Muslim and Chinese parts.  I am hoping to make at least a few people think about the subject of long term national self-sufficiency, pride, and buying "localish" from friends. I'm Canadian but I include the US and Americans as friends in the big picture even though we have differences of national opinion on some subjects. Personal opinions inside of both countries vary much more than our national differences. Just don't listen to me when there's a US-Canada hockey game playing...