Gust of Dust:

July 5/2011; President Barack Obama of the US of A, in a speech at Philadelphia recently, has stated that students of India, China and Brazil are snatching away job opportunities that should ideally come to Americans. In an earlier instance, on 14 June 2011, Obama had said "So these are the jobs of the future. These are the jobs that China and India are cranking out. Those students are hungry because they understand if they get those skills they can find a good job, they can create companies, they can create businesses, create wealth. And we're falling behind in the very fields we know are going to be our future.  So we can do better than that. We must do better than that. If we're going to make sure the good jobs of tomorrow stay here in America, we've got to make sure all our companies have a steady stream of skilled workers to draw from," he said.

Obama surely did remind us about his immediate predecessor George Bush Junior by using the words ‘hungry students’. After having gained notoriety for his Afghan and especially Iraq wars, Bush had, just before demitting office, publicly said that due to economic prosperity shining on China and India, citizens of those two countries were eating much more than earlier. This increased consumption would create a worldwide shortage of food, predicted Bush. Though this sentiment of Bush had created mirth amongst many, Indians in general had kept a stoic silence.

Now, however, the Obama statement of recent origin, which was expressed at a fund raising event for his Democratic Party, shows the fear and loathing that exists in the minds of upper crust Americans about peoples of India and China. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everyone thought that the new setup would be an unipolar world where America would be the reigning head. Obama, from the very beginning of his current term, has been harping on curtailing ‘outsourcing’ by US corporates. His argument has been that outsourcing has deprived America of tens of thousands of jobs and that is a major reason for economic slowdown in the US. In spite of repeatedly expressing such an opinion, he could not influence companies already reeling under heavy financial burdens to eschew outsourcing. Probably thinking that it may boomerang if he continues pressuring American companies in this matter, especially in the last year of his first term, Obama has changed tack. This new coloring of the old issue may create a fresh problem. By constantly saying the same thing, he could be consciously creating a new kind of economic racism against students of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian origin studying in the US. It is, to a great extent, true that in American institutions such as NASA, MIT, various IT companies, major hospitals, Universities and even research organizations, people of Asian origin and specifically Indians and Chinese dominate in important posts. It is also to be admitted that no one could compete with Indians when it comes to taking up jobs and slogging as servants for not such large sums of money.

If America has gained world dominance today, it is primarily because, in the past, that nation has created technological and scientific wonders that the rest of the globe had no choice but to accept.

There is another angle to this issue. Many in India used to complain about ‘brain drain’. Talents, in search of gaining wealth, left this country for American shores. Those interested in higher research also left India as that activity is capital intensive and thus could not be carried out in most economically backward countries. It is an accepted quote that “Brain drain is better than Brain In Drain”. Along with this argument, it is also known that those Indians who migrated for research got lost in the gust of dust in the US. Though earning larger salaries, no single Indian has, as yet, any claim for research recognition. None has even been a claimant for, say, the Nobel or any such awards of international repute.

It may be questioned why this fear psychosis in the minds of people like Obama. A possible reply could be that, in the Malthusian theory, huge populations like those in India and China, also spawn larger numbers of higher intellect. Thus citizens of those nations are likely to grab more lucrative jobs of the future. With this in mind, it has to be remembered that like most western nations, America too is an ageing society. Very few children being born there makes it more susceptible to threats of the future. When considered in this light, the views expressed by Barack Hussein Obama may be an indication that on one hand, America needs Indians to serve that nation. On the other hand, they also are carefully crafting a new social order whereby those Indians, albeit moneyed, would always be cornered and treated as second class citizens.