Export the unemployed: More jobs for Americans abroad than at home
Although North America and Europe have finally emerged from the darkness of the global financial crisis, and although the stratospheric growth rates of Brazil, China and India have come down to earth, the economies of the West still lag behind those in the rest of the world. That’s particularly the case when it comes to jobs. The unemployment rate in the United States, for example, remains stubbornly around 7 percent. In Chile, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mexico and South Korea, however, the official unemployment rate is way lower. Faster growth is key to high employment just as recessions produce welfare queues.
So here’s a novel solution to America’s problem: Move the people to where the jobs are.
Exporting the unemployed may sound radical, even cruel, but the quest for jobs has been a driving force behind global migration — and population growth in the New World — for centuries.
More than 55 million Europeans, many desperate and poor, migrated to the Americas between 1846 and 1940, for example — often with a “good riddance” from their home governments. And in the past few years, those movements have started up again. When crippling unemployment throttled Spain, some 30,000 Spaniards upped and moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010. The Portuguese, meanwhile, beset by debt and slow growth at home, are heading to Brazil and oil-rich Angola. Between 2008 and 2011 alone, more than 1 percent of the Portuguese population moved to just that one African country. (In terms of relative population, that would be the same as 3 million Americans packing up and shipping off to their country’s ex-colony, the Philippines, in search of a better life.)
But Americans haven’t been searching for a better life somewhere else on nearly the same scale. According to the State Department, only about 6.3 million U.S. citizens live abroad, or around 2 percent of the domestic population. In relative terms, that’s pathetic. About 5.5 million British people live permanently abroad, almost five times the U.S. level in per capita terms.
Maybe they’re trying to escape the lousy weather, but it isn’t like Brits have natural advantages over Americans as travelers. British people are almost as bad at speaking other languages as Americans are, and in terms of haughty isolationism and disdain for foreigners, surely Brits are worse. (I’m allowed say this — I’m British.)
So why shouldn’t America send out some huddled masses for once?
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2013/12/15/Export-the-unemployed-More-jobs-for-Americans-abroad-than-at-home/stories/201312150136
= new reply since forum marked as read
immigration law to deal with. Should Americans emigrate to Mexico & compete with Mexican workers? Or maybe to China? Or to Africa, which I hear tell will be the last frontier of outsourcing?
The writer seems to be suggesting that Americans should joins the other refugees, deportees, immigrants & emigrants in steerage.
All this migration does is serve the 1% in their game of dropping worldwide wages.
