Archive for January, 2007

Archives for Globalization

Watch out, the 2008 U.S. presidential elections are coming and globalization will be all the rage. If Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s recent comments in the Wall Street Journal are any indication, there could be a lot of hot air by politicos yet very little substance to these assertions. Webb wrote: “In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future.”

If you are planning to argue that globalization has negatively impacted the American worker, isn’t it a good idea to compile evidence, rather than espouse gut fear? I wonder how Sen. Webb would parse a decade’s worth of data about unemployment insurance claims, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics?

What’s telling about this data is the consistency of the numbers - there’s nothing to indicate a rise in unemployment coinciding with, say, China & India’s meteoric growth in jobs and GDP in the past five years. Note that America experienced a downturn in 2001 and 2002 but that jobless claims have been decreasing ever since. No one contends that the post-millennium downturn was related to globalization; on the contrary, it coincided with a recession, 9-11-01, and the dot-com bust. The current 4.5% U.S. unemployment rate doesn’t suggest to me that we’re facing a wave of immigration that is undermining the American worker, but let’s save that debate for another day.