Excerpted from GLOBAL DREAMS - Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, by Richard J. Barnett and John Cavanagh, First Touchstone Edition 1995 :
Part Three
The Global Workplace
(page 303)
For the receiving countries, mass immigration is a mixed blessing. Corporations operating on their territory clearly benefit from an ever widening choice of cheap, nonunionized, and substantially nonorganizable labor. At the Seattle Sheraton, as in most urban hotels in the United States, the hotel's housekeeping and dishwashing staff is foreign-born. "We don't have American-born people apply for those positions," the manager explains. A large influx of immigrants, many of them illiterate and without either legal status or technical skills, helps to change the local labor-relations culture. Workers without a green card that grants noncitizens the right to work in the United States are not easily persuaded to join picket lines. Indeed, immigrants have traditionally been employed as strikebreakers. The earlier immigration coincided with the rise of mass production, but the new immigration has arrived in the era of flexible production. Temporary workers are hard to organize even when they are native-born Americans. The presence of large numbers of unorganized, exploitable foreign-born workers has a depressing effect on the wages and working conditions of all nonskilled workers.
Compared to those who came in the immigration waves from Europe a hundred years ago, the new immigrants on the average are poorer, and more of them are female. For these reasons many have a harder time blending in the American melting pot than earlier generations of immigrants. The economic necessity of sticking together for economic survival often makes them appear more clannish than they would otherwise be. Many hang on to their languages and cultures as a way to develop the financial resources from within their own communities as well as the inner strength to face a society that is often less than welcoming. On the other hand, the United States in recent years has benefited from an influx of skilled, motivated, and highly educated workers. More than 1.5 million college and university graduates arrived in the 1980s, many with advanced degrees, and American high-tech industry has increasingly come to depend on Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Chinese scientists and engineers. In 1989, foreign-born students received almost half of all the math and computer science doctorates in the United States, and over 50 percent in engineering. The preparatory-schooling costs for these new productive American workers paid for by the Indian or Korean government is a form of reverse foreign aid.
But the United States and the other receiving countries import problems along with the migrant labor force. The major problem is social tension, which becomes especially serious when the economy is weak and jobs are scarce. In a 1992 Business Week/Harris poll, "68% of respondents said today's immigration is bad for the country." (Seventy-three percent of African-American respondents were convinced that "business would rather hire immigrants than black Americans.") Some U.S. unions call migrants "indentured servants" and complain that they take jobs away from union members. But the complaints are overdone. Most of the jobs are at the low end of the scale, and most union members would not take them in any event, at least as long as any social safety net remains. For American workers, the competition from foreign workers who stay home is a much greater threat. And that threat is growing. College attendance for blacks in the United States dropped by 7 percent in the 1980s, and the high-school dropout rate for Hispanics, the fastest-growing group of new entrants into the U.S. labor market, is even higher than it is for blacks, about 40 percent. [...]
The countries of Western Europe are experiencing some of the same tensions as a result of importing guest workers. Despite high unemployment rates, the pressures to bring in workers from abroad remain. The Continent faces teh prospect of an aging population and a shrinking labor force. For years both halves of Germany have had negative birthrates. Thus there are unfilled jobs at both the top and the bottom of the employment ladder in certain population centers across Europe. The sudden availability of a vast labor pool in Russia and Eastern Europe may well encourage corporations in Europe to export production instead of importing more Asian and African workers [remember Europe's colonialist agenda vs. the U.S. global mindset]. But economic conditions there are uncertain, and there are large numbers of immigrants already settled in industrial Europe.
Despite the more conservative governments of recent years, the countries of Western Europe retain a social-democratic culture. On much of the Continent, retirement and welfare benefits are liberal, far more so than in the United States, but the reserves to fund the benefits are not. Almost half of all men between the ages of 55 and 64 on the Continent and virtually two-thirds of the women are retired. Many European workers fear that their pensions and other entitlements will be cut because foreign workers are skimming off benefits that should not be going to people who mangle the French language or look so out of place in the Rhineland. Neo-Nazis in Germany and reactionary nationalists in France have viciously attacked "the foreigners in our midst." As ethnic identity becomes more of a political force in Europe, foreign workers are faced with murderous harassment and threats of expulsion.
Japan, thanks to its rapid economic growth over the last forty years, its negative birthrate, and its relatively controllable borders, has for years been the one world economic power without an unemployment problem. (In the recession year 1992 for the first time in many years there were slightly more people looking for work than positions waiting to be filled.) But the Japan Federation of Workers has called the labor shortage "the most difficult problem facing Japanese companies." According to a survey conducted by Japan's Ministry of Labor at the end of the 1980s, 268 companies reported that they were unable to hire even a quarter of the new young workers they were seeking. Sony officials say they have trouble recruiting enough engineers in Japan, and this is one reason why more research facilities are being shifted overseas. But Japan has been reluctant to encourage immigration as the answer to its labor shortage.
Most Japanese oppose liberalizing their stringent immigration laws, which have helped to preserve a single national culture and a racial "purity" that some claim is the key to Japan's phenomenal postwar success. (Even the presence of 1 million Koreans and 25,000 Ainus, the remnant of the original islanders, amid 122 million Japanese is a considerable source of tension.) Japan has preferred to rely on internal rather than transnational migrations. [...]
But the pressure to recruit from abroad has been mounting. In 1988, 80,000 legal migrants were admitted into the islands, but 88 percent were sports figures and "entertainers," the latter category made up mostly of Filipino or Korean women who end up as prostitutes or domestics. Low-skilled Asian males stay on illegally after entering as tourists and they find work in the major cities. There were, according to the Japanese Ministry of Labor, about 210,000 of them in 1991, mostly working on construction and in restaurant kitchens [same pattern as with Europe's (North-)African immigration]. According to International Labor Organization estimates, there may have been as many as 500,000.
The experience of being a worker in a foreign land can be anything from hell of a sweatshop to the American dream come true. Many migrant laborers in the United States and Europe find themselves the most isolated members of what they see as a hostile and terrifying society. Others are embraced by ethnic communities that provide the sort of financial and emotional support Americans long for but fewer and fewer find. Some are the most productive members of American society by any definition.
The same technologies that enable a global commercial culture of American origin to penetrate traditional societies and to overwhelm local cultures make it easier for ethnic minorities in America to preserve their cultural identities. Thanks to satellite communication, Taiwanese in Texas can gather around the TV and watch their favorite programs from back home. At neighborhood video stores and ethnic restaurants, new immigrants can rent the hit movies of Mexico, Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Vietnamese "boat people" who arrived penniless in the United States were so eager to have a television and VCR that they would often scrape together the money a few weeks after arrival. Street vendors, ethnic-based churches, clubs, and restaurants transplant distant cultures and transform the landscape in suburbia.
The new immigration, like those before it, enriches, fertilizes, and renews the older American community, but it also subjects it to strain just when the sinews of nationhood are fraying for all sorts of other reasons. The arrival of Latinos in large numbers has transformed the once-depressed inner-city Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., into a lively center of ethnic music, sidewalk stands, and markets. The restaurants, boutiques, and parking lots do a brisk tourist business. But in a time of high unemployment, many African-Americans, who make up 65 percent of population of the nation's capital, resent the success of the newcomers. Even those at the top of the society, though they increasingly depend on immigrants to look after their babies, to do their washing, and to fix their cars, feel inconvenienced by the babble of foreign tongues. Senator Robert Byrd complains that he cannot understand the Russian auto mechanic at the repair shop he has patronized for years. Elementary-school teachers complain that the children of the new immigration are not learning English. Increasingly, the sound of conversation on the Washington, D.C., Metro has turned into a polyglot hum; the employess of Giant, the largest food chain in the area, speak twenty different languages. (The company has added signs in Vietnamese and Spanish in forty-five stores.) In Miami, three out of four residents speak a language other than English at home. In New York City, 41 percent of the residents speak a foreign language in their homes; 40 percent of the people in Los Angeles are foreign-born. For the nation as a whole, according to the 1990 census, the figure is 32 million.
"Multiculturalism" has become a heated political issue in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other industrial countries that have received large immigrant populations. The new immigrants are largely nonwhite, and increasingly they are insisting that their cultures be studied and honored. The United States is approaching the time when it will no longer be a white country of primarily European origin. In important metropolitan centers such as Miami and Los Angeles this is already true. But power, money, and status still overwhelmingly belong to the descendants of European immigrants. [...] |
