FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE...
It warmed my heart to see this headline in the Wall Street Journal tonight, talking about how US tech executives are finding very well-paying jobs with IT companies from India (aka, increasingly less negatively as the second most populous country in THIRD or the DEVELOPING WORLD).
It's been my view for some time, that despite all the talk of the negatives of "outsourcing", particularly by CNN and Lou Dobb's long-time, and unrelenting rant of "Exporting America", our politicians and media have seriously under-sold and under-served their constituencies in bashing the easy to burst Pinatas of open trade.
Although Lou Dobbs says that no other news organization has "addressed the facts", he generally ignores news of the type the Journal and other more balanced media are continuing to report. Instead, he continues to use his position to editorialize a significant portion of CNN's business "news"cast, making it all but unwatchable for people like me.
The increasing reality is that companies from China, India, Brazil and other parts of the so-called developing world are going to increasingly be buyers of US companies and businesses, providing employment and growth in a industries ranging from textiles to steel to health care to technology to agriculture, and beyond. The recent purchase of IBM's PC business by Lenovo is but a minute datapoint in this long-term trend, in just one industry.
Indeed, longer-term, we have an even bigger potential problem if we don't change our views on immigration as a people. Whenever the topic of immigration is discussed on the TV media in particular, they'll bring on a talking head or two of how to "protect our borders", meaning mostly the physical border to Mexico. What is not focused on is how we are making it increasingly difficult for "foreign" students to come here for higher education (still one of the shiniest and best exports of the US) in the name of homeland security. Increasingly these students are going to countries in Europe and Canada, depriving us of some of the brainiest talent on the planet.
Just in the world of the Internet, one wonders if we'd have had a Sun Microsystems without Vinod Khosla from India, or a Yahoo! without Jerry Yang from Taiwan, or eBay without Pierre Omidyar from France, or Google without Sergey Brin, formerly from Russia. And that's just a handful of people from the little ol' Internet/Technology industry just in the last two decades, much less the impact of brainy immigrants on the US economy over 229 years! It's just that the negative impact of immigration is generally felt before the positive impact, and stretches over decades, i.e., over multiple political terms and anchor-person regimes.
As John Doerr of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins so eloquently puts it, we should increasingly staple Green Cards to the diplomas of foreign students graduating from US universities, so that they'd stay and contribute the country's economy directly, rather than heading back to China or India for better opportunity. Who knows, the ultimate irony may not be the parodied news of a possible future announcement regarding Lou Dobbs, but that Lou Dobbs is hired as the lead anchor by India's ZeeTV RupiyaLine?
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