Criticism of the globalization of technological capitalism usually takes two forms; loss of jobs or economic injustice.

Proponents of economic justice believe huge multi-national corporations imprison the world’s most vulnerable people into cruel sweat-shops to exploit their labor and natural resources. In short, globalization is simply a rich nation exploiting the labor of a poor nation.

60,000 protestors poured out of Birmingham churches in 1998 to call on the G7 (the leadership of the seven most powerful economic nations in the world) to take Leviticus seriously and proclaim a Jubilee year, forgiving all debts to underdeveloped countries.

At the G7 in Seattle, and again in Genoa, the protestors turned both violent and counter-capitalist. Windows of banks were smashed in and ATMs were set on fire. One protestor was killed by Italian police. The total amount of property damage was estimated at over $100 million.

What started out in England as deep concern by Christians for the welfare of the world’s poorest citizens has now degenerated into violence, ultimately discrediting the movement.

Proponents of protectionism denounce the loss of domestic jobs to laborers in developing countries, many emerging from abject poverty. When consumers bargain shop Mexican or Chinese or Indian products at Costco and Wal-Mart they are, in fact, undercutting the American labor market. They put their own jobs at risk. Protectionists would like to restrict such trade. For protectionists, globalization is simply a poor nation exploiting a rich nation’s market.

So which is it? Are the justice seeking protestors right that the desperately poor are victims of capitalism? Does speculative capital undermine the economic and financial stability of countries and peoples the world over, and worsen poverty and underdevelopment?

Or are the job protectionists like Pat Buchanan right? Is ‘cheap international labor’ the greatest threat to American jobs? Should we halt the use of cheap labor in Asia or Latin America in place of unionized workers in the United States?

Last week at the G7 in Boca Raton no protestors showed up. Maybe this issue has gotten so confusing and contentious the protestors themselves are having a difficult time sorting it all out.

totheosurce asked Dinesh D’Souza to give us some insight into this complicated and controversial issue. Born in colonialized India and now an American immigrant and citizen, D’Souza is uniquely qualified to shed some light on this important debate.

The Fuss Over Globalization
By Dinesh D'Souza

To hear the anti-globalists tell it, their angry demonstrations and disruptions are justified because they are speaking out for poor workers in the Third World, such as my native country India. In their view, poor people in places like Thailand, China, and Nigeria are being exploited by free trade and global capitalism. How cruel, they say, that a multinational company that would have to pay an American worker $15 an hour can get away with paying a Third World worker a meager $5 a day. Moral indignation suffuses the breast of the anti-globalist.

But this moral indignation is a bit of a pose. To see why this is so, let us begin with the charge that companies are exploiting foreign workers by paying them appallingly low wages. Five dollars a day seems like an outrage by American standards, but is it unjust for Coca Cola, Levi Strauss, or General Electric to pay that much to workers in a country where the going rate is $3 a day, and where things cost much less than they do in America?

Anyone who has lived in a Third World country, as I have, knows that when multinational corporations advertise for jobs, there are long lines of applicants. The reason is simple: as Edward Graham of the Institute for International Economics documents, multinational companies offer the best-paying jobs around. Some anti-globalists are skeptical about this, but why would Third World workers work for multinationals unless they were being offered a better deal than they could get elsewhere?

Not only do free trade policies help foreign workers at Coca Cola and General Electric, they also help other families in Third World countries, because the increased demand for labor pushes up wages even for workers who are not employed by multinational corporations. Thus countries that have embraced globalization, like China and India, have seen growth rates of 5 percent or more per year, compared with 2 percent in Western countries, and 1 percent or less in countries outside the free-trade loop. Free trade and globalization have helped millions of Third World people to enjoy the amenities of a middle-class lifestyle.

But perhaps the anti-globalists think that the multinationals could do better. Why not mandate higher wages for Third World workers? Even better, why not require that they be paid the same rate as American workers? The obvious reason is that under such laws Coca Cola, Nike, and General Electric would prefer not to use Third World labor at all. Multinationals hire Third World workers because they are much cheaper to employ than their First World counterparts.

Admittedly a Thai worker making shoes for $5 a day is likely to pose a competitive threat to an American worker doing the same job for $15 an hour. Alarmed at this prospect, American unions are fighting desperately to protect their members from foreign competition. UNITE, the textile workers union, even opposes measures to open American markets to Asian and African textiles. In supporting restrictive tariffs and trade barriers, the unions realize full well that they are in direct opposition to the aspirations of Third World peoples seeking to raise their living standard through trade with the West.

In this fight American unions have found a strange ally: columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. To permit foreign workers to compete with Americans, Buchanan writes in The Death of the West, “is to betray our own workers and their families. We should put America first.” Buchanan’s argument is basically tribal: we should uphold the interests of our steel, shoe, and textile workers at the expense of the rest of the world, whose economic welfare is not our concern.

Much as I disagree with Buchanan, let’s at least credit the man with being honest. He doesn’t really care about the Third World, and he is willing to say so. Such candor is woefully absent from the anti-globalists, who may believe they are fighting on behalf of the Third World but are in fact undermining the interests of Third World people. This is what many of us with Third World backgrounds find really disturbing. No wonder that ordinary people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are conspicuously absent from demonstrations against globalization. Poor people from the Third World increasingly realize: with friends like the anti-globalists, who needs enemies?