Corporate vs People Immigration

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.

Drugs and OIl

There are two topics in the headlines right now about problems with commodities that the United States consumes in larger quantities than any other country in the world.

Oil

One problem is the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the oil rig explosion on April 20th of this year millions of gallons of oil have been flowing into the gulf of Mexico and will continue to do so for some time. Wildlife is being devastated, 11 workers lost their lives, the people living along the Gulf Coast have lost their livelihoods, many people along the gulf coast will lose their way of life, and a major oil company has shown that with all the technology we have today we cannot plug a hole in the ground on the bottom of the ocean. There is a man made disaster going on and many blaming the lax standards of a greedy oil company.

I don't want to pick a side in that fight. I want to point out only that oil spills happen. In fact this is not even the worst one to occur, it is merely the worst that has been in United States territory. The bottom line is that drilling for, bringing up, transporting, and using fossil fuels is going to always involve risk and until we as a society find another source of energy we are not going to be able to eliminate the impact of those risks.


Drugs

The other is the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico and boder security. I saw a report yesterday detailing how the Mayor of a Mexican border town was assassinated by cartel lords who did not like the fact that he was in faovr of law and order. What amazes about this story and the broader debate about immigration is that somehow the United States consumption of illegal narcotics is almost always overlooked. Our society is funding the war lords of that region by buying narcotics at a tremendous rate and yet we don't want to acknowledge that the real reason so many people are trying to cross the border is that Americans are destroying large regions of thier country.

This is not to say that I blame drug addicts for border problems. I don't. I have scarcely any understanding of why we as a society consume so many narcotics. What I do know for certain is that our policies for managing the use of illegal narcotics have not been successful in limiting their use. I also know that hundreds, if not thousands of people in the border area of Mexico die in fights to control who gets to supply our demand for narcotics. I can't come up with some simple solution that is going to solve this problem. I do think we should at least start by acknowledging that a tremendous amount of the instability down there is a result of narco trafficking. Continuing to pretend that cutting off the flow of drugs and people is a more reasonable solution than cutting off the demand is a hypocritical way of blaming our problems on another country.


Conclusion

While we seem to be obsessed with how oil is damaging the livelihoods of Americans and we are in the mood to start innovating a way to cut our consumption of oil, we may want to think about how we can cut our consumption of narcotics as well.

On the other hand, we could just continue to condemn the lawlessness of the Mexican side of the U.S. Mexican border and the greed/recklessness of oil companies and wait for more people to die.