Outsourcing obsession: Geographic borders shouldn't restrict opportunities in the Third World

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It's important to be both practical and philosophical about a relatively recent political issue: outsourcing. That is, the concern that manufacturing and high-tech jobs are being "shipped out" to places like India and China permanently.

This is not your grandfather's political debate. The outsourcing issue has been thrown into the political mix in the past couple of years by calls from think-tank scholars and politicians trying to make an election-year issue out of a non-issue.

First, the practical. Economics, unfortunately, is not something that's emphasized in today's average high-school education. It's no surprise, then, that many of my peers think that jobs are simply pawns moved around the world by governments — there's a few million in one country and a hundred million in the next. To solve unemployment in the first country, you just need to steal a few handfuls from the latter.

Of course, this concept is false. Economic growth comes from creating jobs, not hoarding them. The goal of economic well-being is not to stash as many jobs as possible in one country, but rather to rev up the engine of capitalism and reap the worldwide advantages of economic growth.

A recent U.S. Department of Labor report shows that less than 2 percent of layoffs in the first three months of 2004 were due to outsourcing.

Of the 239,361 layoffs from January through March, only 4,633 jobs were lost because companies thought the job could be performed better overseas. While it's impossible to know for certain if a U.S. job has been replaced by a foreign job, these numbers give us a pretty good idea.

Also, let's not forget that U.S. employers added 248,000 jobs in May — for a total of 1.2 million new jobs this year. With hundreds of thousands of new jobs created every month in the U.S. and only a fraction of the layoffs going overseas, outsourcing is basically a non-issue.

The ironic spin to this is that even if many more jobs were being lost to overseas competitors, it would only mean that workers in those countries are producing and performing at a more competitive rate and, passing on those savings to consumers in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Those who are laid off because of outsourcing must adjust, but that's the nature of the beast ... which brings me to philosophical reflections.

I feel bad for the average worker Joe, father of five, who dedicated 20 working years of his life to the mill, and now finds himself out of a job and with a family to feed because some guy in China can do the same job for lower pay. Joe will have to find a new job, perhaps even find a new trade. Maybe even relocate. I feel bad for Joe. The media feel bad for Joe. John Kerry sends Joe a personal note.

But I'm also glad to see the other working Joe — he goes by Jing and lives in China — has a higher-paying job and his family of seven has a brighter outlook on life. He's no longer working the sewers on the government payroll. His children have a better future. The family can afford a TV now. I feel happy for Jing. I wonder if anyone else does?

If you think about it, it's pretty ethnocentric to believe that just because Joe happens to live within the U.S. borders, he should be the beneficiary of government protectionist policies that build high tariff walls against competing companies and restrict U.S. corporations from offering his job to competing workers.

America hands out more foreign aid than any other country in the world, but I still think it is woefully short of what assistance we should be offering. Energizing the laissez-faire market through globalization and job-creation in Third World countries, however, is perhaps our greatest form of foreign aid.

Let's not become selfishly obsessed with this notion that geopolitical borders should restrict the rights and opportunities of the less-fortunate.

Chris Collins is a junior at Whitworth College in Spokane. E-mail: NEXT@seattletimes.com