The Home of the Free; The Land of the Brave: INDIA?

India, the land of opportunity…

It might be time to rethink whether we should keep the Statue of Liberty or start moving it now.

Are we still seeking those…. “huddled masses yearning to be free?” Not if you listen to the news. It seems that half this country-- especially those who live close to the borders--are screaming bloody murder about immigrants crossing over in droves to steal the jobs of locals.

Some claim that they represent a threat to our security; others are worried about the loss of jobs. That raises a completely different issue: Most of the jobs taken by immigrant workers are at the lowest end of the economic ladder. But there is some relevancy. In fact, virtually all of the jobs created by this government in the past several years have been filled by immigrant labor. What the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t mention is that virtually all of the jobs created have been in the low skill, low paying areas of the economy. But because jobs are scarce, it has become an issue designed to polarize attitudes in border areas.

During Bush’s last trip to India, he went on recklessly to espouse India taking American jobs and said that Americans, while angry about India absorbing American jobs, “needed to prepare itself for 21st century jobs.” Some wondered what those might be. A check of the Dept of Labor revealed that what Bush must have been referring to are the two fastest growing categories considered best bets for the coming century: nurses assistants, a job for which no college degree is required; and food handlers, a category requiring nothing other than a high school education.

If these are the jobs of the 21st century, I would suspect that Americans are in deeper trouble than they may have realized. If you happened to have been addicted to that fraud, “The Greening of America,” the manufactured book that said that we were ready for the next move up the ladder, bear in mind that the authors never explained “how” to make the transition. The trouble was that what was required for America to advance into the Information Age was the same kind of talents and abilities that were available elsewhere; no matter, we still naively bought into the self-generated myth and shipped our other jobs out!

Now, a survey reveals that when American college graduates look for places to ship their resumes, it turns out that India is high on the list. The reason: India has jobs and they welcome American workers…

Sadly, this no longer seems to be the case here where high tech and Information Age jobs are being shipped out as fast as they become available. Look overseas and what do you see? All those American brand names building their identities on the backs of Chinese and Indian engineers, programmers and systems analysts who will work for about 25% of the standard American wage.

Read anything into that?

Maybe you should. It means that America has become the land of retailing and soft service sector jobs that have no multiplier effect in the economy. For that, you can thank your economists and the willing manufacturing lobbyists who have managed to move most of their productivity to far off lands with low cost wages. To give you an idea of how bad things are, we don’t even have a single machine tool company left in the US. That means if we need to start building a new industry, we will have to go overseas for the technology and machinery to do so…

How will that affect us?

Here’s the bad news: In merely five short years; we learned that we are not protected against either terrorism or economic advantage by our Atlantic and Pacific puddles. We have learned that companies are good at taking but bad at returning humanity and compassion; and that they exist for only one thing: Profits. From here on out, we have simply been reduced to units of work that can be transferred somewhere else at a lower cost which, thereby, translates into greater profits for the enterprise.

No compassion; no good will; nothing besides profits considered!

In that kind of cold, inhuman environment, India is looking better all of the time.
Potato pancake anyone?

Les Aaron