Author's Note: I covered some of this in a previous post, My Job Made Me Racist. You just have to wade through some economic and Peak Oil stuff in that one before I get to the point.
Let me be clear: I’ve always been open-minded. I was raised by Liberal parents, and I largely adopted their politics. I grew up comfortably middle-class in the ‘burbs. My schools were nearly all-white, but I didn’t bear any ill will toward people of other races or ethnicities. I had good friends, got good grades and went to a good college.
Fast-forward about 20 years. Now in my late 30’s, I found myself abandoned by my friends, living with my parents and working a stressful corporate job for a company I loathed. Needless to say, I was miserable.
There were nice people at my job. I actually liked my co-workers, including the Indian guy with whom I shared a cubicle. He was very friendly. We would chat, and I got to know him pretty well.
But his presence bothered me. He’d just shown up one day with a bunch of other Indians, with no explanation. In talking to him, I learned the company had brought them over from India to work in the U.S.
This upset me because there was nothing about their jobs that made Indians more qualified for them than Americans. The guy in my cube seemed to be editing a training manual or something, a job for which I was eminently qualified as the holder of an English degree.
The pretext for their hiring seemed to be the difficulty of finding qualified American workers. After hiring me, my first boss had complained about a lack of suitable candidates for the job. She mentioned one applicant who was a “sandwich artiste” at Subway.
I found it odd that they’d had no trouble finding qualified Indians, but finding qualified Americans was an impossible task. Apparently, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Mumbai without hitting an experienced clerk. But in Minneapolis? Not so much. I had a sneaking suspicion the search for qualified Americans hadn’t been quite as exhaustive as the search for qualified Indians.
The argument that there was a dearth of Americans with the proper skillset didn’t hold water with me. This is a complaint businesses have been lodging for a while now. The government (via the mainstream media) also claims that unemployment is low, but they’ve been massaging those statistics at least since Reagan, so I have no faith in their grasp of or interest in the real numbers.
I’ve been applying for clerical jobs with non-profits for years and have only gotten a few interviews. There certainly isn’t a lack of qualified applicants for those positions. Even if there were a labor shortage, it’s not like my job was much more difficult than that of a sandwich artiste. In many ways, it was easier.
I knew why the Indians were here: They would work harder at these jobs than most Americans would, for less pay and benefits. They were clearly thrilled to be here. I saw them on the sidewalks, chatting and grinning from ear to ear. If they didn’t like it here, the company could just send them back to India and bring over some more “grateful” Indians.
That must’ve been a significant deterrent, because my cube-mate was researching how to apply for U.S. citizenship for himself and his family. He originally came over on his own, but his wife, young child and mother later joined him.
He told me about his son seeing snow for the first time, and I was touched. But alongside my fondness for this human being was a hatred for what he represented. It was difficult to separate him from the idea that he and his countrymen and -women were taking jobs away from Americans. They were driving down wages and benefits. They were contributing to the decline of America.
I should’ve been above that. After all, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are my political heroes. I know Indians have suffered far more in this global economic order than middle-class Americans. But now they were here, happily undermining the negotiating position of American workers.
Not just any workers, though. We were white-collar, middle-class workers. Suddenly, I found myself in the same situation as the blue-collar Joe Sixpack’s I’d always kinda looked down on.
Of course, the people responsible for this situation were invisible. The corporate executives were up on the top floors of our skyscraper or in another city or wherever it is they hatch their schemes and sip their champagne.
It’s not like I would’ve actually gone up to them and given them a piece of my mind. But they weren’t even around to become a focus of my internal rage, to absorb my telepathic fury. They only appeared once a year at the company-wide meeting, when they smugly pontificated to thousands of employees across the country and at a few overseas outposts.
The Indians, on the other hand, were everywhere, even in my cubicle, so they bore the brunt of my silent wrath. I started hating people who looked Indian. They didn’t have to be my co-workers. They could just be walking down the street, riding the bus, at the mall, wherever. It didn’t matter.
Eventually, I left that job due to panic attacks, the first of my life. It was no surprise, given the stressful volume of work and my emotional condition. I quickly slid into an abyss of anxiety and depression. I started taking medication.
For the next few years, I wandered around in a fog of shame and guilt, volunteering and trying odd jobs so I wouldn’t have to go back to the corporate world. Behind the wheel, I would see Arabic- and African-looking women in veils driving, and my blood boiled. I still had a strong sense that They were part of the problem and They shouldn’t be here.
One of my odd jobs was taking in donations at a Goodwill. We breathed in a lot of exhaust in the drive-thru. Even though there was a sign asking people to turn off their engine, they usually didn’t. I almost lost my shit when dealing with an Eastern European woman.
She was driving a nice minivan. I figured she was a nanny. I repeatedly asked her to turn off the engine, but her grasp of English was weak. I literally hopped in rage when her back was turned. Finally, she got the message. At least I wasn’t racist that time. She was pale-skinned. I was just being a xenophobe.
It infuriated me to think that this woman who could barely speak English seemed to have a better job than me, even though I was an articulate native with a college degree (in English) from a good college. How the fuck did this happen? Was I really such a fuck-up or was the system rigged against me?
I knew the key to overcoming this paralyzing, blinding anger was resolving my emotional issues. I had to stop blaming my parents for my problems, take responsibility for my situation, have gratitude for the things I had and stop focusing on what I lacked.
Eventually, I started doing those things, but it took a long time and a lot of pain. I took advantage of luxuries not available to most people. I quit my job and lived with my parents. Thanks to my privileges, I found a personal solution to a social problem.
But what about Americans who don’t have those luxuries? How can they cope with this economy? What’s the social solution to this social problem?
During my time in the emotional wilderness, I spent 10 days in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico with a delegation of Land Stewardship Project members. We listened to NGO’s talk about immigration, trade and agriculture. We listened to migrants tell harrowing tales of their journeys. And we spent two nights living with families in a remote village.
The trip provided living proof of a belief I’d held for a long time, that the global economy is built to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. Far and away, the greatest enemy of these people was NAFTA. It was what came up the most and drew the most opprobrium.
But no one talked about making it easier for Mexicans (or Central Americans) to immigrate to the U.S. They all talked about making it easier for them to stay in their home countries. They didn’t want to leave. They were being forced to leave by NAFTA and other economic policies imposed by their governments, often with military force and the U.S. government’s support.
Among other things, NAFTA drove small farmers out of business by allowing U.S. companies to flood the Mexican market with cheap tortillas made of heavily-subsidized corn or wheat. The farmers then moved to the cities or northern Mexico to work in factories or the U.S. Instead of opening up new markets to Mexican farmers, NAFTA exposed them to competition from huge foreign agribusiness conglomerates, against whom they never stood a chance.
The natural reaction from our modern American mind is to say, “If they couldn’t compete, they didn’t deserve to stay in business.” This is Economic Darwinism which, like its Social counterpart, is completely divorced from reality. The truth is all strong industrial economies were built through protectionism.
The reason Third World countries are poor is because the First World prevented them from enacting protectionist policies, through economic and/or military coercion. As in the aforementioned example of NAFTA, rich countries flooded the poor countries with cheap goods, thereby undermining domestic industries and leaving the locals with little choice but to work for the foreign companies that moved in.
Like the Mexicans, the Indians have also been ravaged by the global economy. After the British expropriated most of its material wealth, India became a nominally independent member of the world capitalist system. Despite its independence and democracy, Capitalism has kept it a backwater, like the rest of the Third World, a source of cheap labor to produce goods for the First World.
Even China consistently outranks India in quality of life indices, despite all the political, social and environmental crises it has suffered since the Communist takeover in 1949. This is a telling comparison, since India regained its independence in 1947 and has maintained a Capitalist economy ever since.
The irony of Capitalism’s evisceration of India is that it has made their workers so desperate that they will gladly move halfway across the world and work their asses off in stressful, mind-numbing jobs just to escape their home country. The miserable failure of Capitalism in India has provided it with workers to replace “lazy,” “complacent,” less-motivated Americans.
Gratitude for the vastly better quality of life in the U.S. makes the Indians work harder than Americans. The Indians are still climbing the Capitalist ladder. We Americans are (mostly) descending. Therefore, even though our standard of living is still better than theirs, the future looks bright to them and bleak to us.
But the Indians have another advantage: community. Even though they’re in a strange country, the Indians all live in the same apartment buildings. They hang out with each other in their free time. Those with families have brought them over.
Nor have they been on the Capitalist path as long as we have, so the communities they came from haven’t been as thoroughly dismantled as ours have. They have the social support network to withstand the torment of a soul-crushing job.
We Americans traded our tightly-knit neighborhoods, unions and churches for TV, smartphones and the internet and have found them to be cold comfort. Now that we’re atomized, an increasingly rapacious Capitalism can pick us off one by one, chewing us up and spitting us out. It has divided and conquered us.
The Capitalist endgame is to reduce every country, including the U.S., to Third-World status, wherein a tiny elite rules a poor, oppressed peasantry. Eventually, there won't be any First World to escape to.
It may be tempting to blame immigrants for the loss of the American Dream, but it ignores the fact that they've suffered far more than we Americans have at the hands of the same system. Instead of scapegoating them, we should learn from them what it's like to live even further down the Capitalist ladder. Maybe then we can make common cause to reverse this race to the bottom.
