These General Assembly days, one can’t get past any newspaper without another idiotic attempt to somehow disenfranchise foreigners or foreign-born Virginians. Some 100 laws are now proposed to “restrict” undocumented foreign residents. If successful, no “illegal” immigrant (and perhaps some legal ones) could go to a state school, get a drivers license, work for various cities or counties or get stopped by a cop without getting patted down.
You could get fired from your job for “not speaking English” or you could lose your business license if you knowingly or unknowingly hire foreign-born individuals (most likely dark-skinned”) whose papers are not entirely in order with the State Department or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to State Sen. Richard Saslaw, some of the laws “are the most mean-spirited” proposed in recent memory.
So, it is indeed curious to read the left-hand leader in Sunday’s New York Times. Foreigners, it seems, are buying or making huge investments in U.S. firms at a massive level. Kuwaitis, for instance are taking a $9 billion share of Dow Chemical, separate groups from United Arab Emirates and Singaporeans now have a a big chunk of Citigroup and Britain’s AstraZeneca has a whopping $14.1 billion stake in Medimmune.
Last year, foreign investors poured $414 billion into U.S. firms, the Times reports. The reason? The stocks markets in the U.S. have taken deep dips in recent weeks over recession fears. There are plenty of bargains. The U.S. dollar is weaker than it has been in a long time. Although reeling from the mortgage meltdown and tight money, U.S. companies are still regarded as excellent investments.
To be sure, the foreign spending spree is likely to bring on protests by the more xenophobic “patriots” in the U.S. The same thing happened in the late 1980s when Japanese firms, just before their real estate bubble burst and their economy shrunk in a decade-long, deflationary implosion, were buying up New York landmark real estate properties with a vengeance. The outcries were huge. The same spirit forced one of China’s biggest oil companies to back away from a major U.S. investment a few years ago.
Still, the investments are good news because they bring U.S. money back into the good ole U.S.A. The growing globalization of thw world economy may have its downside with shuttered manufacturing towns aroud in the Great Lakes or textile South, but the cross-investments are likely to create jobs, some of which might replace the ones lost.
If anything the trend towards cross-investment will continue. Foreign stock markets such as Euronext are merging with ones on Wall Street. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, mindful of the convergence of trading, has made it easier for foreign firms to list their stocks in the U.S. and is working towards reconciling different corporate accounting systems. In fact, serious trends are underway that would dump the accounting system used by U.S. firms in favor of a more international one that was started in Europe and is used already by most countries in the world.
Ratcheting our focus down to the Virginia level, you would think it is still the 1950s, when old-style, white-run corporations and governments held sway with their traditional and peculiar ways and mores. Those dark-skinned guys working the lawns and flower beds had better stop speaking Spanish or whatever the immigrant “underclasses” use. And if Virginia lawmakers have their way, they’d all better have all paperwork signed and sealed with all the “Ts” crossed, even though ICE is many months behind in procesing legitimate attempts by foreigners workers here to get themselves squared away.
Ironically, the lawmakers leading the charge tend to be from Northern Virginia, which is the most internationalized part of the Old Dominion. Once again, as I have written before, this state seems to be a kind of parallel universe where what happens elsewhere is irrelevant.
Globalization won’t be irrelevant forever. I can’t wait for the day when one of thse yea-hoo, xenophobic, would-be American patriots and lawmakers confronts his boss for not speaking English and is promptly fired.
Peter Galuszka
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