By Sam Francis
06/10/2004
The good news, as reported across front pages last week, is that some 250,000 new jobs were created in the American economy in the last month.
The bad news, at least for those who hold the jobs or would like to, is that they may soon go overseas.
The June issue of American Demographics explains why "outsourcing," the economic counterpart to ethnic cleansing, is the wave of the future — unless it’s controlled. [PROFITS vs. JOBS, June 1, 2004 (Pay Archive)]
In 2003 Forrester Research projected that by 2015 some 3.3 million white-collar jobs and the $136 billion those who hold them earn will bid a fond farewell to American shores, about 2 percent of all jobs. Last year also, another firm, DeLoitte, reported that some 2 million financial services jobs will take a powder in the next five years.
There are other projections of similar or larger job losses from others — universities, consulting firms, corporations. Paul Craig Roberts, economist and columnist, predicts the United States "will be a Third World country in 20 years." That’s not even mentioning Third World immigration. [Economist’s Challenge Puzzles Free-Trade Believers, By Paul Blustein, Washington Post, February 26, 2004]
The reason is that the Third World as presently defined can now perform the same jobs Americans do at far lower costs. Therefore, in the inexorable logic of capitalism, the Americans get dumped and the foreigners get hired. Today the mountain does not have to go to Mohammed, so to speak, because Mohammed — the job itself, especially if it can be done online or over the wires — can go to the mountain.
Fans of outsourcing, including the Bush administration and its supporters, are not worried. Like the chap in the first Bush administration who, being told that the country was losing the computer chip industry to foreign competitors, replied, "computer chips, potato chips, what’s the difference?" The champions of outsourcing see it all as part of the "creative destruction" that capitalism generates.
This was also the argument for NAFTA, the 1993 free trade pact that promised to help Mexico become a 21st century economy. Even though American jobs might move to Mexico to take advantage of lower labor and production costs, new jobs would pop up here, so displaced American workers would simply readjust.
That hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen with outsourcing either.
One reason it hasn’t happened is that as soon as the "new job" appears, those who offer it start figuring out how to get it done more cheaply.
If the job is menial, you can hire illegal immigrants, but if it requires something like high-tech or white collar skills, you have to send it abroad.
And today there is precious little that can’t be exported.
"Conventional wisdom," one economist with the AFL-CIO tells American Demographics, "is that there is this Promised Land out there somewhere, the next innovation that will soak up all these American workers. But now, anything delivered over telephone or computer can be outsourced. We see outsourcing move up the skills ladder, we're going from data entry up to radiology — there’s no logical end to the trend."
So what are Americans going to do when all their skilled jobs vanish to Bangladesh and Burundi? "The answer, says [Paul Craig] Roberts, seems more and more like jobs at deli counters."
If you thought the 250,000 jobs created in May was great, consider the 308,000 created in March. But looking closely at the March jobs, American Demographics notes, suggests a less cheerful picture:
"Manufacturing jobs showed no gain, nor did semiconductors and electronic components, computer and peripherals, chemicals. IT [information technology] lost 1,000 and telecom and 'electrical equipment and appliances' sector lost 2,000 each. Sectors that added jobs paid an average of 21 percent less than those that lost."
Moreover, as attorney Thomas Piatak noted in the May issue of Chronicles, "the growth areas in our free-trade economy are government and areas subsidized by government … and areas insulated from foreign competition."
It was those two sectors that accounted for more than 70 percent of the March job growth.
In general the people who like outsourcing are the same people who like mass immigration — to them the nation, as a cultural and even as a political unit doesn’t exist and isn’t important, and neither are the people who make up the nation or their way of life.
If they can be replaced by immigrants, that’s terrific, and if their jobs can go to immigrants before they immigrate, that’s even better.
Mass immigration may be starting to produce a popular reaction among Americans who see what it’s really doing to them and their country.
Outsourcing and the whole jungle of globalization that goes with it can only accelerate that reaction, as those who live on the receiving end of globalism experience the economic as well as the political, cultural and racial dispossession it inflicts.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
[Sam Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to orderhis monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred’s review.]
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