Visa holders replace U.S. workers
Visa holders replace U.S. workers
Date: Sunday, August 10, 2003 3:30 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
Some of the best media coverage of the nonimmigrant visa issue is
coming from Florida, and Joan Fleischer Tamen's article is another
welcome addition. This is an excellent, in-depth article about
nonimmigrant visas, but there are a few misstatements of the truth that
need to be discussed.
Erroneous statement:
Technology is "making inevitable the globalization of skilled
jobs," says John Challenger, chief executive of outplacement
firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "To try and stop the
globalization of the workforce is futile. It is a natural force."
The Truth:
Challenger is a corporate think tank so it's no surprise that they
would deliberately obfuscate the truth by equating globalism with
globalization. Globalization is advocated by corporatists who seek to
control the labor market by pitting American workers against foreign
labor. Globalization is a result of public policy and can be changed
when voters demand it. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the
job destruction that is occurring - it's happening because our
government wants it to happen. Robert Locke clarifies the difference
between the two in his paper "The trouble with globalism".
by Robert Locke:
Globalism is a central issue of our time, but its definition has
become slippery. It is confused with globalization, an error that
globalists deliberately encourage. The two are fundamentally
different: globalization is an historical process, a fact
of how things are, but globalism is an ideology, a set of opinions
about how things ought to be.
Globalism is the ideology that advocates the liquidation of
nations. Its opposite is nationalism. Globalization, on the
other hand, is not an ideology at all. Ultimately, it is just
the growth of communications and trade, and it has been happening
since 1492.
Erroneous statement:
"Certainly the intent of Congress in creating H1-B and L-1 visas
was
not to replace American workers," says one of those congressman,
Republican John Mica (R-FL).
The Truth:
H-1B and L-1 were intended to replace American workers with cheap
labor. That's how Congressmen like Mica designed it to work. Mica can
make all the excuses he wants for his seditious behavior but his voting
record exposes his lies. In addition to voting for every increase in
the H-1B limit, in 1998 Mica voted against amendment H.R.3736 that
would have made it slightly more difficult for companies to replace its
citizen workers. Mica protected the right of corporations to replace
American workers a plea of innocence or ignorance just doesn't hold
water.
Erroneous statement:
The recent acceleration of job losses can be traced to the late
1990s when shortages of qualified U.S.-based workers led companies
to turn overseas to countries such as India and Ireland to fix
Year 2000 glitches and write code for booming Internet companies.
The Truth:
Reporters just can't resist talking about those mythical worker
shortages of the 1990s, This myth was propagated by organizations such
as Harris Miller's ITAA. There is ample evidence that the ITAA's
surveys of corporate HR departments were nothing but anecdotal opinions
of corporate spokesman and had no basis in fact. There never was a
shortage of qualified engineers and programmers but there was a
shortage of businesses that wanted to pay a fair salary.
I will send this newsletter to the author of the article in the hopes
that next time she researches this closer before repeating the myth,
because except for this one glitch it's a first class article.
Erroneous statement:
"The L-1 visa is really the dream visa," says Rebekah Poston,
immigration attorney with Steel Hector & Davis in Miami.
The Truth:
The L-1 might be a dream-come-true for corporate immigration lawyers,
but it's a nightmare-come-true for the American middle class.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-sbvisa10aug10,1,648767.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
short Link:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?P67821C85
Visa holders replace some U.S. workers
By Joan Fleischer Tamen
Business Writer
August 10, 2003
Just after 11 a.m. with the mercury already at 90, Phil Marraffini dips
his roller in a tray of white paint and begins work on his neighbor's
entryway ceiling.
"This wasn't the next career move that I had planned," says Marraffini,
47, wiping his brow and swallowing Gatorade.
The senior systems analyst is doing odd jobs in his neighborhood 10
months after he and colleagues at First Data Merchant Services Corp. in
Coral Springs were replaced by contract workers from India.
"What burns me is that I didn't lose my job because I wasn't doing it
well; I didn't lose my job because the company was losing money," says
Marraffini. "They got rid of me because they could put a guy in my seat
who was less experienced and a whole lot cheaper.
"The company says this is an alternative to having jobs go offshore,"
he adds. "But to me, it looks the same."
More and more American technology workers are blaming lax government
oversight for letting their jobs go overseas or to foreign workers
entering the United States under special work visas such as H1-B for
specialized skills, or more recently the L-1, intended for intracompany
transfers.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers says the foreign
workers are paid considerably less and are jeopardizing U.S. leadership
in technological innovation.
The professional group says regulators have failed for years to enforce
federal law that prohibits H1-B visa holders from displacing American
workers, and now are letting companies flood the job market with
thousands of foreigners brought in under L-1 visas who are then
"outsourced" or leased to employers in the United States.
"There has been rampant abuse of the H1-B and L-1 visas," says James
Leonard, president of the 230,000-member group. He warns of possible
"irreparable damage" to hundreds of thousands of U.S. engineers and
technology workers -- and to the country's national and economic
security.
Even in a troubled U.S. job market that has lost some 2 million jobs in
the past two years, the number of L-1 visa holders has risen to 325,000
temporary workers, who are allowed to stay up to seven years.
technology ties to globalization
Multinational companies such as Siemens AG, the German communications
giant which has the U.S. headquarters of its Information Communications
Networks (ICN) division in Boca Raton, counter that they rely on Indian
outsourcing companies to bring in new technologies at lower costs.
"It's globalization," says Siemens spokeswoman Paula Davis.
Labor economists and workplace experts say two significant structural
changes have become intertwined in this country. One is the
technological revolution; the other is the global economy.
E-mail messages travel around the world in seconds. Companies can have
a global workforce of computer programmers, accountants and architects
working around the clock in different time zones.
Technology is "making inevitable the globalization of skilled jobs,"
says John Challenger, chief executive of outplacement firm Challenger,
Gray & Christmas. "To try and stop the globalization of the workforce
is futile. It is a natural force."
But the mounting controversy surrounding the issue has led a U.S.
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to call for hearings next month on
potential fraud in the foreign worker visa programs.
And a handful of congressmen have introduced legislation to tighten the
rules and step up enforcement.
"Certainly the intent of Congress in creating H1-B and L-1 visas was
not to replace American workers," says one of those congressman,
Republican John Mica (R-FL).
Mica says he was moved by complaints from Siemens employees who were
replaced during a round of layoffs last summer by contract workers
brought in by Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software
company.
Michael Emmons, a programmer who lives in the Orlando suburb of
Longwood, says he was among more than a dozen Siemens workers told they
were being let go to cut costs.
"But then they told us, `Before we give you a severance check, we want
you to train your replacements."
subhed
A South Florida Sun-Sentinel review of U.S. Department of Labor
applications shows that at a time of rising unemployment among
technology workers here and nationwide, employers in South Florida and
elsewhere in the United States were telling government regulators they
could not find qualified job applicants and needed to bring in skilled
foreign workers on H1-B visas.
During the past three years, the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services has processed some 856,000 H-1B visa applications (407,500 new
petitions and 448,500 renewals).
At the same time, the U.S. unemployment rate shot up from 4 percent to
6 percent -- to 8.2 million unemployed workers.
Especially hard-hit: the technology and telecom industries. More than
450,000 technical workers have been jobless for six months or more, and
account for one of every three long-term unemployed, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In South Florida, in the past year computer-related professionals such
as systems managers, programmers and software engineers became the
largest group of unemployed white-collar workers at state employment
agencies.
An H1-B visa petition requires employers to submit a "Labor Condition
Application" to the U.S. Department of Labor attesting that they could
not find a qualified U.S. worker for the available job and that they
will pay prevailing market wages.
But no one in the federal government verifies the accuracy of those
applications.
A labor department spokesman said that by statute, they are limited to
look only for omission or errors.
In other words, the applications are just scanned to make sure boxes
are checked off and all lines filled out.
A review of H1-B applications from South Florida during the past two
years shows that some petitions were to fill specialized job functions,
such as an RF (radio frequency) design engineer at Nortel Networks in
Sunrise last January (salary, $73,930) or a foreign tax specialist at
KPMG Consulting's office in Fort Lauderdale (salary, $43,000).
But requests for most H1-B visas to fill South Florida jobs weren't
from Florida-based companies. They were from large computer consultant
companies that do software development in India and also contract out
technology workers.
subhed
For example, government records show that Cognizant Technologies
Solutions Corp., headquartered in Teaneck, N.J., sought visa
applications over two years beginning in June 2001 for more than 500
computer-related jobs in Coral Springs, Miramar, Orlando and Miami.
Nearly 279 of the jobs were for systems analysts (average salary,
$48,500), and a work assignment for three years, with possible
extensions. Remaining positions were for assistant project managers and
senior systems analysts (average salary, $58,900).
Cognizant ranks among the top five suppliers of Indian-based software
development and maintenance services in the United States, along with
Indian companies such as Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies and
Tata Consultancy Services, all of which have U.S. headquarters and
stock that trades on U.S. exchanges.
Larry Gordon, vice president of corporate marketing for Cognizant,
questioned the government data, saying the number of applications
seemed high. He confirmed that the company outsources IT workers to
employers in South Florida, but citing client confidentialitydeclined
to name the local companies.
He did, however, confirm that First Data Merchant Services Corp. in
Coral Springs is a client.
That's where Marraffini of Coral Springs and James Victor of Margate
used to work.
Marraffini helped train the Indian workers who replaced him. "They're
young, single guys and a few women from India willing to work 12 hours
a day at wages far below what we were making," he said.
Marraffini, who first joined the company in May 1994, was making an
annual six-figure salary at $53 an hour, when he was let go.
First Data collected $300,500 in taxpayer-funded economic incentives
from Coral Springs in 1996 and 1998 by promising to create 450 jobs at
its new call center and to relocate offices from Sunrise. State and
county tax refunds totaled $2.6 million.
Coral Springs Mayor John Sommerer said city officials recently looked
into complaints from laid-off First Data employees that the company was
not complying with the economic incentive agreement.
"There is no requirement in the incentive package that jobs are for
American citizens," said the mayor. "The requirement was to create and
retain jobs."
The Coral Springs business is a subsidiary of First Data Corp., the
largest processor of bankcard transactions, with more than 325 million
credit, debit and other accounts. The company posted $7.6 billion in
revenue last year.
Jeff Fowler, a spokesman for First Data said some 1,100 employees are
working in Coral Springs, and guessed that less than 1 percent or 10 to
11 jobs were affected during a reorganization this July that may have
included outsourcing some jobs. He also guessed that the company let go
a similar number of employees a year earlier.
"Not to minimize anyone's job loss, but that is a very small part of
our workforce," he said.
subhed
Marraffini, his wife, Carol, and their three children, ages 15, 12 and
8, live just minutes away from First Data in the Cypress Run
neighborhood of Coral Springs.
When they moved from New York nine years ago, the couple thought they
had found the American dream: a spacious suburban home, good schools
and a job for Marraffini that let Carol stay home with the kids.
Now, Carol works full-time as a nurse at Broward General Hospital in
Fort Lauderdale and Marrafini is juggling odd jobs around the
neighborhood so he can be the stay-at-home parent.
"We're living on half of what the family income used to be," he said.
"I don't see much in my future anymore."
He's doing better than his former co-worker.
James Victor, 51, lost his home in Margate after exhausting
unemployment benefits, depleting his retirement savings and selling off
his prized collection of DVDs and electronics at a yard sale.
He was out of work for more than a year after being laid off from his
$52,000-a-year job as a senior programmer at First Data Merchant on
April 13, 2002.
After being evicted, he moved into a friend's spare bedroom. This
spring he finally found a job doing phone surveys for $8-an hour for a
local company called BeSatisfied. His computer skills impressed his new
boss, so recently he was given a new job building the business' Web
site. He earns a little more than $500 a week.
"I'm doing entry-level computer work at this stage in my career," he
says. "I blame Congress for allowing this visa fraud to do this to our
technology industry."
At Broward County WorkForce One, the state training and employment
agency, "we're desperately trying to get the word out" about technology
workers anxious for jobs, says Mason Jackson, executive director of
Broward County WorkForce One, the state's training and employment
agency.
A recent tally by the agency showed 11 available computer-related jobs
and 2,038 unemployed IT applicants.subhed
The recent acceleration of job losses can be traced to the late 1990s
when shortages of qualified U.S.-based workers led companies to turn
overseas to countries such as India and Ireland to fix Year 2000
glitches and write code for booming Internet companies.
In 1998 and again in 2000, Congress increased the number of foreign
workers authorized to work in the United States on H-1B visas. The cap
reached a high of 195,000, but reverts to 65,000 on Oct. 1.
While the use of H1-B visas is on decline, many companies have switched
over to the L-1 that is much less restrictive, less costly -- and much
less public.
"The L-1 visa is really the dream visa," says Rebekah Poston,
immigration attorney with Steel Hector & Davis in Miami.
There is no annual cap on visas granted. And unlike the H-1B, the L-1
does not require a $1,000 fee earmarked for technology training of U.S.
workers. By far, the greatest advantage is no labor certification
process agreeing to pay prevailing wages.
The L-1 is supposed to allow companies to transfer workers from
overseas offices to the United States. The company can continue to pay
workers their home country wage plus cover their living expenses while
in the United States.
So an Indian worker who is then "outsourced" to a U.S. employer could
be receiving as little as one-sixth to one-third the hourly wage of the
average American programmer, who makes about $60 per hour in wages and
benefits.
The number of L-1 visas granted rose nearly 40 percent in 2002 from
1999. Through June 1 of this year, some 36,901 L-1 visas have already
been issued.
Both the L-1 and H-1B are dual-intent visas, meaning they can be
adjusted to permanent residency.
In addition to Rep. Mica's legislation that would curtail companies
from contracting L-1 workers to other employers, Rep. Rosa Delauro, a
Democrat from Connecticut introduced a bill that would place an annual
cap of 35,000 L-1 visas.
Delauro's bill also would prohibit companies that have laid off
American workers in the prior six months from using L-1 workers,
require prevailing wages and that L-1 workers must have been employed
by the petitioning firm for at least three years.
subhed
But the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or
Nasscom, which represents the Indian software industry in Washington,
D.C., is already lobbying against the tighter restrictions.
"Any kind of rule that your employee can't work on the premises of a
client will have an adverse impact on technology, and other
industries," said Sunil Mehta, vice president of Nasscom. "It should be
left to market forces."
He goes on to call Florida Congressman Mica's legislation "draconian."
Whatever Congress does regarding visas, little can stem corporate
America from seeking advantages by going overseas.
United Technologies Corp., parent company of defense contractor Pratt &
Whitney in northwest Palm Beach County, is profiled in the June issue
of CIO Magazine as an "Indian outsourcing success story." The company
said it has already saved $50 million and attributes $30 million annual
savings to it.
"You can get crackerjack Java programmers in India right out of college
for $5,000 a year versus $60,000 here," says Stephanie Moore, vice
president for outsourcing at Forrester Research.
Estimates are that anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of all Fortune
500 companies are already outsourcing to India, and that's expected to
more than double this year, according to the research group.
Joseph Riano says he got out of the technology field "before it was too
late."
Last summer, the 48-year-old from Boca Raton, a former senior director
of software development for call-center operator Precision Response,
gave up waiting for a technology rebound. He's now a mortgage broker
and earns about one-third of his former six-figure salary.
Workplace experts believe the American worker will adapt to the new
realities of the global marketplace.
But that's a hard sell to displaced technology workers like Marraffini.
"First manufacturing went overseas, and now that IT is going overseas,
along with engineering, accounting, and almost everything else the
middle-class does, what is the next big thing?" he asks. "My children
will be part of the first generation in recent American history to not
have more opportunity than my generation had."
Joan Fleischer Tamen can be reached at jtamen@sun-sentinel.com or
305-810-5030.
Copyright ) 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
June 2, 2003 issue
Copyright ) 2003 The American Conservative
Nation Busting
The trouble with globalism
By Robert Locke
Globalism is a central issue of our time, but its definition has become
slippery. It is confused with globalization, an error that globalists
deliberately encourage. The two are fundamentally different:
globalization is an historical process, a fact of how things are, but
globalism is an ideology, a set of opinions about how things ought to
be.
Globalism is the ideology that advocates the liquidation of nations.
Its opposite is nationalism. Globalization, on the other hand, is not
an ideology at all. Ultimately, it is just the growth of communications
and trade, and it has been happening since 1492. The classic lie about
globalization is its recency. For example, when did it first become
possible to send $100 million from New York to London at the push of a
button? 1976? 1966? 1956? No, 1866, when the trans-Atlantic telegraph
opened.
Globalism the ideology masquerades as globalization the fact in order
to gain sympathy by feigning inevitability. Debates on its desirability
are portrayed as futile. But if it is inevitable, why must its
advocates push so aggressively?
Globalism is a deliberate political choice, no more inevitable than
socialism. Its key exemplars like the United Nations, free-trade
extremism, the European Union, and mass immigration are political
constructs that could be abolished tomorrow. This is not true of such
aspects of globalization as the Internet, the passenger jet, or the
40-foot container.
Globalization can exist without globalism. World trade as a percentage
of world GNP was roughly as high in the pre-1914 heyday of the gold
standard and European imperialism as it is today, but the Western world
was then staunchly nationalist. The anti-nationalist spin that is put
on trade today is not an intrinsic part of the exchange of goods and
services with foreigners. Japan has based her economy on exports for 50
years without ceasing to be one of the most nationalistic and
culturally distinctive nations on earth.
The problem with globalism is not free markets but free-market
extremism, a peculiar kind of right-wing Jacobinism that has no place
in authentic conservatism. In the U.S, this means taking free trade
beyond its common-sense limit of reciprocity with friendly nations and
opening our markets to nations, like Japan, which keep their markets
closed to us, and China, which nakedly proclaim their military
hostility to us.
Globalism is sometimes confused with internationalism in order to
depict resistance to globalism as resistance to fruitful co-operation
between nations. But internationalism, whatever mischief it may
produce, is predicated on relations between nations, precluding their
outright dissolution. Unfortunately, it is a small and intellectually
seductive jump from believing in co-operation between nations to
believing that the co-operative arrangements can be abstracted to
function on their own without the nations that produced them. Many
former internationalists are now globalists.
Globalism appeals to the libertarian Right because this group
mistakenly equates the liquidation of nations with a reduction in the
power of their governments. But this does not follow. Open borders, for
example, benefit immigrants at the expense of citizens and nourish big
government by importing poverty and other social pathologies. Worse,
the decline of national governments, as Britain has learned under the
European Union, is often accompanied by the growth of more distant,
more autocratic, and less accountable authorities. The erosion of a
nation can easily proceed hand-in-hand with the cancerous bloat of its
government: just look at the suffocation of Russia under the dead hand
of the Soviet state.
Because of the ascendancy of neoconservatism during the time that
globalism has flowered, it has been suggested, both by
paleoconservatives and by certain elements on the Left, that the two
are identical. But although neoconservatism is almost always globalist,
it is not intrinsically identical with globalism. Neoconservatism is
conservatism corrupted by globalism.
Neoconservatives adopted globalist ideas because they made sense for
winning the Cold War. They did not, however, adapt when that war ended,
and these ideas have run riot now that the constraints imposed by that
war have gone. The desirability of exporting capitalism and a worldwide
military presence are both Cold War ideas. They once served a vital
American interest by undermining the Soviet Union, but they do nothing
for us now. Exporting capitalism today merely enhances foreign
nations competitiveness against us. This had some consolations when
it made Japan the bastion of capitalism in East Asia. It has none
today, when her long-term geopolitical interests are not identical with
ours and she is financing the economic growth of an openly hostile
China.
It took two World Wars and a Cold War to undo Americas allegiance to
George Washingtons warning against entangling alliances and to drag
us into a worldwide military presence, but given that the founders had
no experience of ideological aggression like Marxism, this was rational
under the circumstances. Those circumstances are, however, over.
Al-Qaeda is not the USSR. Furthermore, because of its religious
character, a return to Americas Christian particularism rather than
the construction of the kind of counter-universalism we arrayed against
the universalist pretensions of Marxism is the needed strategy against
it.
It is sophistry to invent messianic objectives for American foreign
policy in order to rationalize an obsolete habit of projecting power.
Sometimes military presence abroad is called for, but our default
presumption in favor of projecting power into any available vacuum has
led us into pointless involvements in places like Bosnia, Somalia, and
Haiti. It is one thing to project power in order to shape the
international order in favor of real American security interests but
quite another to do so out of some ideological mission to replicate our
system all over the world.
Reproducing the American system worldwide ultimately implies world
government, as intellectually honest globalists like Clinton Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott have admitted. Globalism is often
equated with world government, but this is a half-truth. Though the
drive to create world government rationalizes globalism, destroying the
nation-state can go on whether or not world government is built on its
carcass. The drive to create world government could fail, and, having
dismantled viable nation-states, globalists could leave the world in
chaos.
Globalism also emerged because both Right and Left responded to the
Cold War by interpreting their missions as a supranational battle of
ideas rather than the well-being of the concrete American nation. As a
result, at the end of the Cold War, both the dumber elements of the
world Right and the smarter elements of the world Left came to the same
conclusion: the nation-state was obsolete as a vehicle for furthering
their ideas. The Right wanted more capitalism, the Left wanted more
equality, and the nation-state, a natural bulwark against extremism of
either kind, stood in the way of both. So they set about undermining
it.
The smart Left has admitted to itself whether the dumb Left that forms
its rent-a-mob gets it that capitalism cannot be overthrown. If the
inevitability of capitalism makes economic equality within nations
unattainable, the next-best thing is economic equality between nations.
To see free-trade extremism build up the incomes of the Chinese at the
same time as it impoverishes American manufacturing workers is
immensely satisfying to them. Some have openly said so.
Because the smart Left has abandoned socialism, it no longer wants the
strong nation-states that central planning implied. It now sees the
existence of separate nations as an unacceptable redoubt of human
inequality. Separate nations give peoples with histories of brilliant
political and economic achievement, like Englishmen and Americans, the
free and prosperous lives that their forebears have earned while at the
same time consigning peoples of inferior ancestral achievement to
lesser existences. Therefore, erasing the distinctions between nations
the borderless world is the new leftist egalitarian project. Mass
immigration into the First World from the Third is a key part of this
project, because it forces the citizens of the First World to share
their superior way of life. Globalisms socialist roots are clear in
that it denies that nations are the property of their citizens,
property they are not obliged to share with foreigners.
The technocratic Left, which is just the power-hungry Left grown
sophisticated, sees global institutions as a way to achieve policies
that could never be imposed by national governments subject to
democratic accountability. Because national sovereignty is the key
barrier to achieving this, globalism attacks national sovereignty.
National cultural identity gives peoples an emotional attachment to
their national sovereignty, so globalism attacks national cultural
identity too. In America, this assault takes the form of PC assaults on
American history and the revision of American culture to a universalist
culture. In Britain, it takes the form of guilt over long-vanished and
frequently defensible colonialism. In Germany, it equates any German
nationalism with the Third Reich. In the Third World, it takes the form
of imported American junk culture.
Globalism is contemptuous of any culture that cannot be bought and
sold. It wants a homogeneous commercial pop culture designed to
narcotize docile consumers and make the rootless cosmopolitanism that
it produces seem sophisticated. Philosophically, globalism views
culture as an arbitrary particularity or as mere entertainment.
Globalism does not value the distinct cultures of the world: it is only
interested in Third-World cultures as a means to subvert the historic
cultures of the First World. Its cultural incoherence, which
postmodernism tries to systematize and aestheticize, is a product of
its split between the right-globalist impulse to make culture
commercial and the left-globalist impulse to make it subversive.
If this subversive itch sounds familiar, that is because globalism is
the key successor to Marxism. It claims to represent the inevitable
outcome of the laws of economics and a more efficient form of economic
organization. It claims to serve the well-being of the populace but
requires an elite cadre of experts to impose it. It claims to be
independent of any particular nation, but it depends utterly on one
nations military power to enforce its system. And rather than
coinciding with the withering away of the state, it in fact requires
the expansion of government power.
Globalism gratifies the same mental pathologies as Marxism and is
therefore perfect for disillusioned intellectuals looking for a new
home. It claims to be an empirical theory but is in fact a beautiful
idea invented in the abstract, which can only be maintained by
ruthlessly concealing or rationalizing away inconvenient facts. It
offers its devotees the opportunity to believe that they are a special
in-group that is more advanced than everyone else. And like Marxism,
globalism has a genius for inspiring disloyalty to ones country.
Like Marxists, globalists realize they need global military domination
to impose their vision, so they set about manipulating America into
providing it. Their basic doctrine is that the United States must
project power wherever it is lacking and maintain indefinite global
military supremacy. This is sold as a means to maintain American
security, but in fact the agenda is to uphold the globalized world
order. Their ultimate intellectual coup is to redefine American
security not as our ability to protect ourselves from harm globalists
have no interest in defending our actual borders but as the security of
the globalist system (which we are falsely told is just America writ
large) worldwide.
Ironically, globalism is often depicted as a mask of American
self-interest. It is indeed used as a rationalization for some
assertions of American power, but it also inexorably dissolves the very
bases of this power because the United States, as the most open society
on earth, is singularly vulnerable to its corrosive forces. We can call
this the neocontradiction. For example, American free trade with China
builds up Chinas industrial base, yet we presume we will always be
so much richer than China that we will endlessly be able to afford to
contain her military expansionism. Worse, this same trade depletes our
own industrial base and economy, reducing tax revenues and forcing us
to borrow from Japan to pay for expensive military deployments. This
arrangement gives Japan a quiet veto on our use of force.
Advocates of indefinite American global hegemony project American
economic dominance into the future with the insouciance of a British
colonial secretary circa 1889. They cannot ask hard questions about the
significance of relative economic power because globalism seduces
Americas power elite precisely because of this unstated assumption
that America will effortlessly dominate a globalized world.
They are in for a rude awakening, and soon. If the dollar falls by half
the standard estimate for what it would take to bring our unsustainable
trade deficit back into balance we will have to double our
contributions to international organizations in order to maintain our
clout. In fact, all our international spending will have to double to
retain our position.
If Americas share of world GNP, now at 25 percent, falls to 12 or 13
percent, which is what this decline implies, we will no longer have the
weight in the world economy to play as large a role in setting its
rules as we now do. The prestige and credibility of the so-called
American model of economics will decline too. The world will not listen
to the idealistic economics of a declining nation.
The longer we premise our foreign policy on being the sole superpower,
the harder our fall will be. The sooner we abandon this delusion, the
easier will be our return to our natural status as a large, prosperous,
and powerful nation among others. The sooner we face the inevitability
of a multi-polar world, the more of a head start we can have in
arranging our place within its inevitably complex web of alliances.
Here at home, globalist neocons assume continued Republican dominance
even though their devotion to mass immigration is destroying the
Republican Party by importing Democratic voters. But because, for
globalists, ideologies are more real than empirical facts, those
globalists continue to spin contorted verbal rationalizations to cover
up this fact of political demography.
Foreigners, please understand that the aspects of American policy you
find obnoxious are really aspects of globalism. Therefore, you should
be anti-globalist, not anti-American, just as America was
anti-communist, not anti-Russian.
____________________________________________________
Robert Locke works in the computer business in New York City.
June 2, 2003 issue
Copyright ) 2003 The American Conservative
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