I Love Foreigners

I’m a xenophile. I get excited when I hear a foreign accent. Something about it makes the person seem more exciting, more intelligent, or more mysterious, sometimes dangerous; all depends on the country or ethnicity. I love that joke about heaven, hell, and all the different cultures. It's cheesy, but you've got to admit it's funny.

I called a customer service line today and no doubt was connected to a call center in Bangalore. An Indian female with a British-tinged accent answered. After she politely (with impeccably timed elocution) asked me my name, she referred to me as “Miss Milena” for the duration of the call. Swoon. I felt like I was on that Spaceship Earth ride at Disney World, seeing the electric synapses firing all the way to India and I feel like I’m part of the global revolution. I wonder if she’s vegetarian, or likes chicken tikka masala as much as I do. I didn't ask.

I wonder, do other people feel the same? Or do they shudder when they hear an accent bemoaning how are jobs are being shipped overseas? I think of the woman I spoke with, wondering if her job affords a lifestyle not previously available to her. After reading Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat, I am happy about that possibility, even if an American had her job just a few years ago. That is if I truly believe in the benefits of a global economy, diversity, and “classical” liberal ideals. I'm not afraid of foreign achievement, I welcome competition, realizing it will allow the world to grow leaps and bounds. I guess some people think the playing field isn't level arguing, "How can we compete with people who will do our job for half the cost"? I would have to wonder, "Why would an employee expect to be paid twice as much for services that someone else will do just as well for half?"

And what about fair labor wages? I agree that some populations work in harsh conditions, but who am I to decide if it's an "unfair" deal? If the alternative is work for $0.05 an hour and feed their family...or have no job and survival is bleak...the $0.05 is a Godsend for many of these workers. If you impose trade restrictions or wage floors on ABC Company which sources foreign labor, they may not be able to afford to do business, period, pricing them out of the market. So the ABC Company folds, losing whatever U.S. jobs they had, and foreign labor gets nothing, not even the $0.05 that both parties would have agreed upon. No one wins. And if the Democrats get their way, there will be a lot more trade restriction, er, revision in the future.

Anyways. I wish people wouldn’t give overseas friends a hassle while they are trying to make a buck. Why is it a "zero sum game" or "my nation against yours"? There are a lot more long term benefits of globalization than the short term incoveniences of temporarily getting paid less, needing to get re-trained and better educated, then getting paid more. It works like this. Factory or call center workers train for jobs requiring more brain work. People like me re-train and move up to management, become professors, business owners; those above me could become CEOs, entrepreneurs, or get advanced degrees, learning to think more creatively, problem-solve, or become doctors, scientists, whatever. I'm talking simplistically, but you get the idea. Free up many people from grunt work to doing work that matters more. Creative, complex work, that's what the U.S. minds are great at! Not to mention, some of the greatest minds in the U.S. are from foreign countries...Jesus, you'd think people would want a smarter, better trained population - we haven't yet found cures for cancer, AIDS, MS...but we are griping that we can't make $25/hour screwing on bolts or picking up phones...

I’m reminded of a funny story:

My old hairdresser’s assistant, to most appearing to be a short, skinny, white dude with a fake tan, drove to inner city Detroit because he had a hankering for corn rows and there was a great salon that did them. On his way back from the appointment he stopped at a light and an African-American woman driving next to him rolls down the window, starts laughing hysterically, screaming out the window…“Where you from? I ain’t never seen no white boy with corn rows!”
The assistant replies, “I’m not white, I’m Cuban.”
Woman, “What?”
Assistant, “Cuban, I’m Cuban!”
The woman, still laughing, “Well shit honey, we all human!” And drives off…

We're all human, let's have a little love for the rest of the world.