Immigration and Outsourcing & Neo-Con Mercantilism

Immigration and Outsourcing
North Americans conservatives seem to have lost the plot a little. Neo-conservative "free traders"(?) seem now to advocate mercantilism.

Let us consider their and other's perspectives on illegal immigration, jobs and other factors in apparent conflict with the USA's economic interest. Outside the Garden of Eden or Nirvana such views are to be expected. But are they wise?

Why should American, or for that matter European workers such as the French, fear outsourcing using the Internet or high levels of immigration? In the "Integral Economic Age", at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius knowledge is increasingly the main source of value and values not physical assets. Immigration or outsourcing as threats are simply not an issue in this era.

Economics as the science of ultimate scarcity has now ceased to exist. If the primary resource is now knowledge this, unlike capital and land, is potentially infinite in extent. Its only limit is the rate at which you are able to create it. If this is sufficiently high then scarcity will disappear as an issue.

Knowledge jobs outsourced to India and physical jobs to China do increase the wealth of the Indians and the Chinese. However this is not necessarily at the expense of the Americans. This is old economic thinking based on the idea of resources being ultimately scarce. The Chinese and Indian middle classes together will, on relatively short time scales, be as large and as rich as the whole US population. This creates an even bigger market for the imaginative goods free thinking American are so demonstrably capably, above all others, of creating.

Creative well living Americans, who have lost their jobs elsewhere, can move to supplying the planet's need for ideas on what such goods and services can be and in doing so they can well do without devoting themselves to the business of servicing each other. That is now done increasingly effectively by Central and South American Spanish speakers.

The USA has the know how, experience and systems to continue to lead the world in creativity if it chooses to allow itself to do so. Nowhere else on the planet does one find so many new jobs generated so fast as when Americans create better:-


1. more comfortable holidays, cultural events and entertainment. It is to die for;

2. ever more effective ways to organize production and distribution

3. understanding among more and more people at an ever increasing rate.


These things together mean that jobs lost to the needy in India, China, Indonesia and the Spanish speaking world (including illegal but useful immigrants into the US from Central America) only create more and more better jobs for Americans. The emerging knowledge economy is truly WIN WIN WIN.

This is truly a return to the Garden of Eden. Hunter gathers then had only to reach up and grab the fruits from any tree bar one, the tree of knowledge. In choosing to take from that mankind, among other things, became aware of property, the idea that one could own a part of a physically limited universe. One could fence it off and own land to cultivate things on or own machines to make things rather accepting the universe's bounty as free to all.

"Don't Fence Me In" and Free Range are not new issues for Americans. Many took part and died in the range wars that ensued from such sentiment over land in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The space to be fought for now is not free range land in the big horizons of the American West but free ranging ideas in the infinite vista of cyberspace.

The Chinese are indeed already trying to fence that using Internet tools. This was evident in the recent Congressional hearings on the actions of Google, Cisco and others in helping the Chinese government draw boundaries in that cyberspace. To the extent it is possible for thme to succeeed in doing so they can only harm themselves. They will fence themselves and their thinkers off from the cutting edge of emerging technology. This still comes in the main from the USA. Provided the Americans do not continue to shoot themelves in the foot technologically with overly protective policy on IPR and restrictive self defeating policies on immigration it can continue to do so.

Controlling the free movement of the new key resource, knowledge, as embedded in people and the ether, is now virtually impossible. Keeping people out in our post-modern age only harms oneself. At the bottom end of the job market it leaves necessary jobs undone, done badly or worse still less productively by people who would be better employed on creative knowledge generating tasks. At the top end of the market such exclusion ensures that the best most innovative ideas will be generated elsewhere.

This is likely to be the case anyway as the creative thrust essential to the New Age is likely to be situated in many not one country. US past concern to protect its defence industrial base ensured that much modern ICT was developed other than in the USA. Current immigration policy, never mind that proposed by neo-con mercantilists will ensure that the worlds brightest and best no longer find there way into the US for their education and post doctoral research. Already they are going in droves to the UK, Australia, Canada and Europe or even increasingly to their own region - nuclear scientists and engineers at home in Iran for example (see our post yesterday).

"The Global Silk Road" predicts the decreasing relative political economic power of both the US and China. Each will grow in absolute terms one more slowly, the other rapidly, but they will both steadily lose out in relative terms. On the other hand those nations who use English as the lingua franca of business and are too small to have a domestic market big enough to support modern technology - Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, etc. will grow collectively in economic power.

Such places have to operate in the global market of 6.5million poor not their domestic ones of a few tens of million relatively rich. The domestic US market of 300 million relatively rich is temptingly too easy for US suppliers of ideas. The Chinese market of 1.5billion poor, with an increasingly substantial and well off embedded middle class, is similarly likely in the end to tempt Chinese entrepreneurs away from the global market place.

Knowledge products have significant upfront costs in creating them but even a $650million cost spread over a global population of 6.500 million is 10cents a copy. The is a product for all the poor not just some of ones local rich.