Down with Globalization

In Tripped up by Globalization Jeffrey Sachs describes the devastating effects on the middle class in America and Europe as multinational corporations clean up with globalization. He ends with this indictment: 

The recent swoon in financial markets and the stalled recovery in the US and Europe reflect these fundamental shortcomings. There is no growth strategy, only the hope that scared and debt-burdened consumers will return to buying houses they don’t need and can’t afford. Sadly, these global economic currents will continue to claim jobs and drain capital until there is a revival of bold, concerted leadership. In the meantime, the markets will gyrate in pangs of uncertainty.

True, but I thought the following comment by Kathy a more compelling description of what is really happening to millions of loyal, hardworking, well-educated Americans:  

I live in Silicon Valley, CA home of the Asian competitor, next door. In 1985, when my engineer husband and I moved here we got jobs that paid about $43,000 for him (he has a degree in Math and one in computer science) and I was paid $30,000(for a B.A. economics and M.S industrial psychology). We worked about 75 hours per week on average (most weekends too). My husband got promoted every year and I also moved up from very hard work. We saved about 60% of our income and invested it in houses and stocks. When we started, we had literally nothing --just a Honda hatchback car.

After 11 years, we had saved and invested and lived in a house in a working class neighborhood---that was inhabited by mostly auto mechanics in the 1960's. We bought this house for $415,000 and it was in terrible shape (built in 1952). We fixed it up with our own labor on weekends.

By 2000 we were doing pretty well, but our standard of living was really no better than the middle class existance I had as a kid....prices were so very high in Silicon Valley, you see. Houses were insanely expensive as was just about everything. We both noticed the phenominon inside our companies that more and more people from India, China and South Korea were taking jobs here and moving into our neighborhoods. As liberals, we welcomed this and though it was kind of "nice."

By 2005, it became obvious that this "trend" of shipping more and more people from India, China and South Korea to Silicon Valley was getting way out of hand. I started researching the trend and found out that nearly 1.2 million American engineers had been fired and replaced with foreign H1B and L-1 visa workers from these countries. Main streets all over the Valley were now dominated by Chinese, Korean and Indian-owned small businesses. They moved really fast. Companies like Infosys and Wipro were making bilions off this low cost trade in its own people.

Meanwhile, Americans with B.S.'s Masters and PhD's in Math, Computer Science and Engineering were getting fired left and right and outright replaced by non-citizens. It was alarming. They I found this website called CompeteAmerica.org which showed all the multinational tech giants like Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft and many others had joined forces to allow an "unlimited" number of H1B visa immigrants to come to the U.S and take our college grad jobs in 25 categories, even beyond engineering and software.

This phenomenon is going on all over the U.S. and is sponsered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many U.S. multinationals. They have been "claiming" for years that there is a shortage of qualified, educated citizens to fill these jobs. That is a total and utter propoganda lie. There are millions of highly qualified engineers, and every category who cannot even get an interview anymore. U.S. universities have been flooded with foreign students who take our places because they are charged 1.5 -2.5 times more tuition than American students. We invented and developed the technologies for PC's, smart phones, the Internet, and the semiconductors. The Asians are now flooding our country and being allowed to take our jobs.

Meanwhile, in my neighborhood including all the towns in the San Francisco Bay area that hire technology professionals, the U.S. census data show a 50% increase in the Asian population between 2000 and 2010.

During this time period, pay for senior management in high tech companies has risen 500% while wages for highly educated engineers, and scientists continue to drop. Indian engineers live 4 people to a small apartment and are "promised" U.S. citizenship in return for cheap labor. Some of them get it. Many do not. I want to say it's not thier fault and they are just taking a good opportunity---and they are---but I resent it. Why should I --the citizen who worked really hard, got the education and did all the hard work get replaced by a low cost alternative non-citizen by the age of 40? This is wrong. Not to mention my education cost $90,000. What is the cost-benifit in that for any engineer?

The Americans have been fired and these companies are breaking the laws for visa holders (which say you can only hire H1B or L1 if you show there is no American who can fill the job) they are firing American's (from Harvard, MIT, and all our great schools) and replacing them with anyone who will take the 1/3 -2/3 pay cut. At least half of these Indian, Chinese and South Korean tech workers went to "junior" colleges or worse--non accredited Goldman Sachs private college mills which have zero requirements to get in. This is not progress.

This is what globalization has meant to me and my neighbors in California. I did not even mention the massive illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America---the census showed they numbered 35 million in 2000 and 50 million in 2010---accounting for almost all the U.S. population growth since 2000.

This is a strategy to make U.S. multinationals rich, and to utterly destroy the middle and lower classes through opening the floodgates of immigration. And I was all warm and fuzzy about "equality." This is not equality----this is the treason of the multinationals. They have destroyed us.

I wanted to give readers a real life picture of what is happening at street level. Some "granularity."

Down with globalization.