Apr27 issue of the Economist: SV deportation; PH dictator; victim blaming; entrepreneurs again; and capitalist restoration

On Silicon Valley: Deportation Order and "Brain Circulation"

SILICON VALLEY, as the old joke goes, was built on ICs—Indians and Chinese that is, not integrated circuits. As of the last decennial census, in 2000, more than half of all the engineers in the valley were foreign-born, and about half of those were either Indian or Chinese—and since 2000 the ratio of Indians and Chinese is reckoned to have gone up steeply. Understandably, therefore Silicon Valley has strong views on America's visa regime.

The latest reminder of the power of the “quota raj”, as Indians like to call it, came on April 2nd, the day the Citizenship and Immigration Services began receiving applications from employers for this year's batch of H-1B visas, a special class of visa that allows highly qualified foreigners such as software programmers to work in America for up to six years.....

AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “The New Argonauts”, a book on the subject, argues that the exact opposite is the case. It might be called brain circulation.

Immigrants, she maintains, tend not to leave a place altogether. They form networks that, in effect, make Silicon Valley the head office and their home countries the branch offices. That's what the Taiwanese and Israelis who came to Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s did, and the Indians and Chinese followed the same pattern.

I'm not sure if "brain circulation" adequately describes highly trained and educated contract workers in the Silicon Valley and other U.S. areas. I suspect that only a very select of these contract workers (with H1-B visas or student visas if they are in graduate school) have sufficient resources to become transnational capitalist entrepreneurs. If they are already from elite and well-off families in India, China/Taiwan/Hong Kong, and other Third World areas, then maybe there educational training and transnational political-economic networks can make it possible for them to shuttle back and forth and circulate their "brain." More likely, U.S. homeland security will ask any H1-B visa workers in the U.S. who are not from elite families to leave once their visa expires, re-negotiate their labor (at a lower cost) back home, and find work again outside of their home country.

Also, the title of this article on "deportation" is misleading and hides from the reader the horrific experiences that many (both authorized and unauthorized) migrants who are not very rich face during detention, deportation, and inadmissibility activities. Further, the title conflates the terms "immigrants" with "contract migrants," ignoring the often miserable working conditions of both low wage and seemingly high paid contract workers in the U.S.

On The Philippines' elections: Celebrity big ballot and "An Elected Dictatorship"

This article makes several interesting observations:

VOTERS taking part in the Philippines' mid-term elections on May 14th will be put through an absurd ordeal. They must memorise the names of up to 18 candidates for various positions in national and local government and enter these by hand on a blank ballot-paper. What this means is that those with the best-known names, not necessarily the best policies, tend to win....

Mrs Arroyo's coalition, Team Unity, wants a strong mandate to unclog the corridors of power by changing the constitution to replace presidential rule with parliamentary government. But it has kept quiet about this issue, knowing that any talk of changing the constitution inevitably stokes public suspicion that it is some sort of plot to establish an elected dictatorship. Last December the threat of mass public protests forced Mrs Arroyo to drop an attempt to ram the charter-change through Congress.

We have to wait to see that extent to which the current dictator will use election fraud and violence to stay in power and the mass public protests will force the dictator out of office. And what does it really mean to say "elected dictatorship"? Dictators are not elected by the People; they sneak, cheat, and use corruption and violence to run the country.

On Another day, another $1.08 and Blaming the Victim Again

Why, for example, do more Ghanaian farmers not cultivate pineapples, which would fetch returns of 250-300% by some estimates? Why do so few farmers in western Kenya dress their fields with fertiliser, even after the benefits have been demonstrated to them?

“One senses a reluctance of poor people to commit themselves psychologically to a project of making more money,” the authors write. When you live on a dollar a day it may be painful to confront your circumstances too squarely, or even to aspire to better things. The “great redeeming feature of poverty,” George Orwell wrote after his excursions in the social gutters of Paris and London, is “the fact that it annihilates the future”.

Again and again, I ask why do academic economists in the Third World blame the Third World poor for creating their own conditions, their lack of psychological "aspiration," and the poor's seeming inability to strive for a better future under capitalism. I wonder why? Duh!

On Joseph Schumpeter and Entrepreneurs Again

Modern economic historians remind the business world of J. Schumpeter's teachings: that capitalism is great; that entrepreneurs as risk takers are the main engine of capitalist innovation; and that inequality and social problems are a small price to pay for material progress. I guest Schumpeter likes migrants with lots of money (such as those in Silicon Valley [see the first summary above]). Where did these entrepreneurs get the money in the first place? Was it theft? Someone forgot to read and learn from the "primitive accumulation" chapter written by another more famous economist and political thinker.

On the Death of Boris Yeltsin and Rebirth and Restoration of Russian Capitalism

Here is an interesting commentary on what jump-started capitalist restoration in Russia:

For millions of Russians, it seemed that Mr Yeltsin's liberalisation of prices in 1992—not the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union—had plunged them into poverty. He refused to back off. Unlike Mr Gorbachev, he did not want to reform the communist system. He wanted to break its neck. His mass privatisation, which destroyed the basis of the regime, created robber barons too, and a communist backlash was never far away. In 1993 armed communists and fascists tried to overthrow Mr Yeltsin's government; he shelled the hostile parliament. In 1996 communists almost won the presidential elections; by twisting the rules, he saved himself and his country.

Yeltsin seems to be just continuing the restoration policies and reform programs set into motion by Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Grobachev.