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IMPORT WORKERS OR EXPORT JOBS

About a man with roots in the entire world, the kind of person that many of us are becoming every day. A man who belongs everywhere, or as locals would have it, nowhere at all.

The blog version of the article is available here.

The man who owned the world (like the rest of us)

By Prasanna Lal Das

This article was originally published on this site

Anthony Gonsalves, an erstwhile imported worker who now holds an exported job, a man of many worlds and none at all, is ready to go home. Home is his village, it is his uncle’s house in the town that he went to school in, it is the cousin’s shack in the nearly-city that he went to college in, the city where he worked the first 10 years of his professional life, the town-house he bought stateside when he worked there and may still return to, the villa ‘back home’ where he now lives, and the property he is considering in the next state for when he settles down. Or home is where his many suitcases are, the suitcases that have traversed the world but seem so rooted wherever he puts them, till it’s time to go again, and again. He has however never felt like a man with suitcases packed and ready to go; it is just that he has moved across many settled existences.

This isn’t really the life he dreamed of when growing up with his parents in a village that was so big people never went out, and the few who did, could never muster the energy to return to. It is however a life that has provided him with everything he could dream about – job satisfaction, social acceptance, material security, a future that both he and his family can look forward to; and isn’t that what everybody’s dream life is about anyway? He pauses only occasionally to ponder over it but finds that he is not alone. The world around him is full of people for whom the world opened suddenly and drew them along with itself, into its ever expanding boundaries, the ever new opportunities, its abhorrence of vacuum, its menagerie of cultures all so alien and yet so fundamentally similar, its fascination for apposite opposites, and its apparent meaninglessness despite powerful claims of a central design – yes, he is now resigned to being part of the ‘big bang’ generation which relentlessly grows outwards and has no center, in fact he has almost begun to revel in it.

In many ways, Anthony realizes that he is only a harbinger of a profound change sweeping the world, just an early warning rather than the strike itself. He is still faintly exotic everywhere he goes – his accent and food preferences sort of give the game away at Paris and New York, his accent and food preference are also a constant source of amusement at his parent’s house in the village he was born. His clothes don’t quite have the sharp cuts he sees on the streets in London, and they are stitched from a totally different cloth from what his friends at Delhi wear. He hangs out with foreigners, outsiders, and ‘transferables’ in India, and with Indians abroad (though everybody really wants to live in ‘non-Indian’ areas). And of course, literature on alienation and exile jostles on his shelves with CDs that he picks up from around the world, mostly to show his friends his presumptive backslapping acquaintance with the international street-cred.

Questions of identity are indeed the ones that leave him the most perplexed. Not for him the socio-political and cultural agonizing over diaspora, clash of cultures, and discourses on civilizational transmutation, he only worries about the constant predilection among several commentators to portray him as an outsider, even though he himself doesn’t feel like one anywhere he goes. He, who has never hesitated to call many places home, is easily branded as the ‘other’. He was the other child in his uncle’s house, he was the other caste in his friend’s shack, at college he was lumped as one of the others from another state, at work in a famously cosmopolitan city he was astonished to hear that others like him were filching jobs from the locals, in the US he was treated as the other person from the other country removing food from the tables of Americans, ‘back home’ in India now he is stealing food once again as the person who has taken jobs abroad from their mother countries.

Sometimes, he thinks he should take this to heart – after all, he is not the only other one. Everybody pointing fingers at him is an outsider too. Like those suddenly patriotic newspaper commentators – didn’t their country (and most others, and his too) not even exist till a few hundred years ago, didn’t their parents swear allegiance to different flags, isn’t most of their staff from other states in the country, didn’t most people in the city actually come from outside, isn’t everybody actually not stealing jobs from someone else who could conceivably lay a stronger claim on these jobs based on grounds of identity, region, and culture? Every one of them is guilty, except that people choose to expand or constrain the definition of identity differently at different times – let’s be honest, almost none of them would be where they are today if one or more of their ancestors in the past had not chosen to pack their bags (if they had any) and gone looking over the yonder. Sometimes far, sometimes just to the next village – but go they all did, rather than wait for work to come to them or concede the work to someone else just because that person was born at the right place. The age of opportunity based on geographical accidents is surely past, bound to end soon like preceding privileges based on birth, social rank, divine rights, religion, caste, tribe, and others did.

And what of countries and states, and votaries of sons of soil who raise bogeys that largely peaceful and eminently employable people like him will destroy local economies, destabilize cultures, and maroon future generations with stronger claims to the local air? These are the countries that scare him more than the allegedly failed states or threats to the global order. After all, each of these countries was built on forcefully emphasizing the obligation of other countries to welcome foreigners; these are the countries that forever demolished the smugness of insular countries that had once snubbed them; and these indeed are the countries that built today’s global order by emphasizing the international picture over the merely parochial. Anthony worries that these countries are in moral retreat now, that passing troubles have sapped their courage to look outwards which once made them great and still keeps them afloat, that righteousness has vanquished right. He digs deep into the numbers that drift across TV screens everyday to make sense of the current pessimism, numbers that talk about the local jobs lost, the numbers that talk about the coming migration deluge, the numbers that show an increasing burden on the state exchequer due to new but unaccounted people, the numbers that show that soon there won’t be enough ‘original’ people left in many countries, the numbers that show a different number of countries in the world every day, the numbers that represent his new province (one that didn’t exist till yesterday except in a few slogans), the numbers that don’t always add up, the numbers that change so often that you stop registering them. Anthony can now keep track of only one number – the one on his passport (but wait, soon he will have two of them!).

He steels himself everyday for the uncertainties and dilemmas of life around him. He knows that his own community in the village that he left behind now faces starvation –because of new people who have taken over many traditional roles due to their superior education, and new goods that make their way unfettered to all parts of the country. He understands that you cannot take away misery and resentment by arguments about the inevitable flow of historical forces. He is also painfully aware of the double (or most often, triple) standards employed by his own country in its treatment of migrants, both internal and external, and the discrimination migrants from, and to, the ‘wrong’ regions/countries face. His after all is the country that fawns on natives that made good abroad but makes it nightmarishly difficult for people from other countries, especially from its neighborhood, to either emigrate or work legally for even short periods of time. The hypocrisy is equally shared by all – there are no good guys in this movie, and no plain black and white either.  

And so, sometimes he begins to feel guilty – he wonders if he was a part of his country’s brain drain, the much lamented (but not much else) phenomenon that, popular wisdom has it, deprives the country of its best and the brightest, its ‘export quality’ people. Should he have stayed ‘home’? He questions his loyalty to the countries that he goes to, did he make a contribution there or did he merely collect gold-dirt and move on: has that been the story of his life – the man who took from his village but never returned, the man who took from his college but never gave any back, the man who hoarded through his working life but never shared any? After all, he returned home not because he loved his old country any more than his new, he was just following the next job-opening (though it did make him feel elevated to hear that his expertise was going to contribute to his country’s ‘brain gain’!).

Anthony mulls over all this as he drives home. He isn’t completely sure about the way yet, and there are few maps in this country, but he senses he may be heading in the right direction. His only guilt has been his ability to make choices and live by them, and his choices have followed the choices the communities and governments of his time have made, or been forced by common sense, to make. The results have unwittingly made him the face of a profound social movement that is gradually chipping away the late medieval nationalistic anachronisms that dog our world even today – you cannot have both a global village and national gaols. He is dismayed that debates that pit imported workers versus exported jobs still exist – the two are mutually exclusive categories as far as he is concerned, and favoring one over another rather than economic realities (for ideological or even allegedly short-term pragmatic reasons) can only exacerbate social divisions, apart from the small matter of guaranteed financial ruin. He reckons that people have a fundamental right to better their lot and the world has little to gain by depriving large sections of its population of opportunities to work, study, and prosper just because they were born on the wrong latitude. Such barrier can also be immensely shortsighted as all they eventually achieve is the separation of the right skills from the right needs (and our experience with closed economies has already told us that no nation, however determined, can excel at all the skills that its population needs to be contented). Most nations have demolished such barriers within their territories, and it is time to do the same across nations. 

Anthony has no illusions that his worldview will find easy acceptance. The fear of change, the unpredictability of the short-term consequences of free human movement, false notions of national pride, the actions of the odd deviant, and bogeys about ‘ways of life’ are still too strong for cocooned nations to contemplate any purportedly radical moves. Like all our forefathers, he must resign himself to doing the best he can for himself, his family, and his community, and the best way to do that is to answer the call of work. It has taken him around the world because every place in the world needs a little help from the outside, and always will, and he knows that if he shows up often enough, he will gradually be more welcome. He was born to the world, and loves all of it – someday, all of it will love him back (and ask for taxes in return!). All of it, after all, is his home.

August, 2004

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