Recently a debate has centered around the presence of illegal immigrants in the United States and the continual outsourcing of jobs from developed to less developed countries. These two debates are linked in a fundamental way that is becoming more important for us, as global citizens, to understand. The bottom line is that as long as corporations are free to move from country to country, while people are not, we will continue to see a decline in the middle classes of more developed countries.
The cycle of corporate development and migration starts when a country develops rules and regulations to attract companies to do business on its shores. The economy in the country grows, which causes inflation and gradually increases the costs of doing business there. In addition, as workers gain political power they demand increased wages and services. When it becomes expensive enough that the company can justify investing in a less developed nation (which will welcome them with open arms) the cycle begins anew. While eventually this might lead to vast swaths of the world having more development the immediate result is the marginalization of the new middle class as it springs up in different areas of the world.
The reason why companies can get away with moving jobs to poor areas and paying very small wages comes down to a misplaced set of values when it comes to immigration. Corporations and large businesses can select from the entire world the place where they think they will be able to make the most profit and for the most part quickly move there. While some countries may be too unstable or not have friendly policies, many are willing to oblige corporations in order to attract the jobs and new income they can provide. On the other hand, for most people living in the world the country where they have to work is the one in which they are born. The result of this imbalance is that companies can exploit the desperation of third world countries and more importantly third world workers.
Governments continuously compete for large corporations to bring more jobs to their areas. On the other hand most developed nations have powerful anti-immigration political groups and try to prevent people born in one nation from coming to live and work in theirs. Countries shift their policies to provide the best environment for large businesses instead of the best environment for all people. The result is that people are forced to see borders and walls but corporations are not.
A better approach would be to loosen up immigration law so that countries are forced to compete for the best environment for workers instead of the best environment for business. Currently such competition is extremely limited by the way immigration law works to prevent the movement of people. If people could move relatively freely countries would have to develop policies that would keep them there instead of migrating to other nations. Limited economic opportunity would remain a problem which foreign aid would be needed to deal with, but no longer would development depend on an exploitative cycle the ultimate effects of which could last generations (especially when large amounts of pollution are caused by nearsighted factory owners).
As leftist as open borders may sound at first the result is one that people who believe in free markets should understand as an increase in competition. Currently corporations rarely have to compete for cheap manufacturing labor. While top talent for higher corporate jobs may be hard to find physical labor can be found in much of the world. For poor workers in many countries almost any job is preferable to simply sitting in decaying communities, even ones that are severely underpaid or in some cases even hazardous. But they are not able to cheaply choose to leave their homes and seek employment in places where workers are protected from exploitation. Instead they must choose to work in the country they are born in or risk living outside the law and remaining exploitable. The current race to the bottom, where countries get investment dollars usually because they have little regulation protecting workers and the environment, could be changed dramatically if workers were more free to seek work in the place that treated them most fairly. Instead of building a new factory in a developing nation where the workers have no other choice companies would be forced to pay fair wages and locate in better areas because they would have no choice.
Clearly this post is only meant as a conversation starter and leaves out almost all detail and some serious considerations that would have to be dealt with before such a plan could be put into effect. All I want people to think about is whether 80 years of anti-immigrant bloviating has helped secure the middle class or whether it just might be undermining it.
