M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Throughout the European
Union, and increasingly in the United States and Australia, immigration is
being directed on racial grounds, with preference given to immigrants of
European origin. This is despite the reality that an immigrant from Chennai or
Hyderabad in India is far more likely to add immediate economic value to a
society than migrants from Tirana, Bucharest or Sofia, to take just three
examples.
Even Britain, till now a haven of
race-neutral policies, has lately introduced measures directed against citizens
of countries other than those with European-origin majorities. Clearly, to many
Western policymakers, "globalization" is a one-way street, confined
to improving Western access to other locations but hostile to a reverse flow.
The blocking of a Dubai-based company from acquiring a port in the United
States -- even though that city is largely run by executives from Western
countries -- is just one of numerous examples of the phobic reaction to efforts
by outside corporations to buy into Western companies.
Astonishingly, even the corporate sector
has not freed itself of biases dragged over from an age in which European
countries administered most of the world. Today, both India and China are witnessing
growth rates that could in a generation recreate the period when India and
China accounted for over half the world's output, an age that vanished only in
the early 1880s. Especially since the 17th century, what has driven Western
prosperity is the unprecedented expansion of knowledge within those societies,
which even today account for nine out of ten scientific patents worldwide (a
small but increasing proportion of which are being contributed by researchers
of Asian origin).