America: Land of Opportunity? Yes but...

No longer exclusively. Not by any stretch of the imagination. This, I think, is a great reality of 21st century economics that will need to sink into the heads of many Americans. Until then, their constant whiny bitterness has officially put me in "old-angry-shotgun-wielding-some-crazy-little bastards-are-pissing- on-my-lawn-reclusive-man-mode". It's a real mode. With lots of dashes. I personally came to this conclusion years ago, but a user's comment to a recent article on the blog of the "Dallas Observer" brought it back to the forefront of my mind.

The article dealt with a young man raised in America since the age of 3 by Bangladeshi parents who had immigrated illegally to the US. Their pleas for asylum repeatedly denied, the governement allowed them to remain in the country until the young man completed his high school education at the age of 18. Without getting into too much backstory (you can read the article here) the kid is now apparently in Bangladesh afraid to leave his apartment for fear of being kidnapped or harmed. In other words, the average FOX News viewer. The comment that got me thinking was submitted by user Hesiod -

He's better off. Soon all the jobs he would have been trained to do at UTA (University of Texas at Arlington where he had a scholarsihp offer) will have been offshored to Bangladesh, India, China, etc.. This way he might actually have a chance of finding steady employment, instead of going to 4 years of college, only to find himself on the dole! He can learn Bangladeshi. Better emigrate to where the jobs are, not to try to be where the jobs are leaving in droves!

I immediately thought that if this comment were a recipe it would call for a tinge of bitterness, a sprinkling of snark, on a big heaping of marinated unintentional insight, and finally a batter of popular public opinion. Don't try to fry it up you might get hurt. Besides, you can eat it for free every night on the nightly news. It's the only recipe Lou Dobbs knows. Yet its flavor hinges on a mythology. That mythology being that America is, in its very existence and as a facet of its inherent nature, singularly deserving of the label "The Land of Opportunity".

While it's true that America is a land of many opportunities, globalization now requires the use of the article "a". Sorry America. If it ever made any sense, "the" doesn't any more and more than likely won't ever again. Why be bitter? This change was as inevitable as the setting of the sun or the rising of the tides. That is to say, both depend on gravity and what goes up must come down. As one might expect, nation states fair no better in this respect than celestial bodies.

It's interesting that Americans for years watched immigrants arrive seeking opportunity here and wherever else they might find it in the world. Now that some jobs and opportunities are leaving, you've got people whining instead of...going wherever the opportunity is. The simple fact of the matter is that there was never any guarantee that that place would always be the US for all eternity. People just became spoiled; and spoiled people can get off my lawn.

We've got computer scientists whose jobs were outsourced saddled with debt working at Wal-Mart for the benefits. You've got recent college grads working in no relation to their degrees at Starbucks to pay the rent. All because they can't, won't, or aren't being encouraged, to see the bigger picture and to pursue opportunities outside their immediate sphere of experience.

Though the picture is obviously different for "high skill jobs" that have been outsourced than for blue collar work, fact is those jobs jobs didn't disappear. Wherever they went they still pay very well relative to the cost of living of a particular region. We've got millions with college degrees working in fast-food joints when they could be utilizing their skills and talents and making more relative to the cost of living if they just opened their eyes to the world before them.

There are many obstacles to globalizing labor markets as other sectors of the economy have been globalized. Some of them are institutional (no financial incentives for worker migration in search of opportunity as with businesses), some practical (language barriers), some more basic (fear of living in a foreign land.) Yet if you see the issue on these terms, and realize that if those holding protest signs, drinking themselves to death because their radiology job got outsourced to Mumbai, or spending their days thinking of catchy names to call "immgrants" (intentionally misspelled to reflect the stereotypical southern bigot) the main complaint seems to be that all opportunities are no longer conveniently located down the street from the house of the average American. Guess what? That's not going to change.

This need to consider that you may have to leave your country to pursue opportunity and better your standard of living is a scenario most of the rest of the world dealt with for over a century. That was globalization. It seems many Americans assumed that oft-mentioned process was a one way street. Reality is it's not and no one place has a monopoly on opportunity any longer despite mythologies to the contrary. Americans are drowning in debt in an economy where wages have stagnated as cost of living has soared. It's a pattern that's decades in with no sign of stopping. The important question really is - "is being leveraged up to your ears to own a moderate house 40 minutes away from any decent services or amenities in Suburban California or Texas really better than being debt-free, using your skills, and owning a condo in a mid/highrise in Mumbai?" It's a very long and grammatically fishy question. Yet the very fact that the answer is not as clear as it might once have been should show us how much things have changed when it comes to the "American Dream"...