One, the free people who go to such countries do so at significant risk. A blue passport does not confer immunity to oppression -- and people not thoroughly familiar with the informal rules of the society in which they are living have a harder time evading both the informal and the formal rules. If they try to compensate for that, they may end up living more cautiously than the locals. To ensure that foreign workers are kept under control, some countries (including, I think, the UAE) require them to surrender their passports to their employers.
Two, in some countries, such as the UAE, Westerners are likely to end up living and working entirely inside Western enclaves, with little contact with the local people. An American in Dubai is, I suspect, likely to interact a lot more with British, Russian and American professionals and Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino servants (and perhaps an Indian or Filipino professional or two) than with Emiratis.
I agree that right now the human rights situations in such places are more hopeless than not, with respect to the particular liberalizing influences we can even imagine to hope for, from contact with Westerners to new breakthroughs in stealth broadcast capabilities. While it is hard to overestimate the close-mindedness of the vast majority of those even slightly empowered under a repressive political system, young shoots of hope will always appear, and through them, perhaps very subtle shifts in attitude can be disseminated, no matter how small the trickle. Perhaps like lucky mutations, some notions or attitudes, some innocuous-seeming memes, can quietly spread over years, which individually are impotent and effectively dormant, but which may someday contribute to public opinion on some public case, and find a more visible foothold. And at the same time, the old guard is always dying out, and the ideological make-up of following generations always contains a chance that a relative reformer will appear among the empowered, and find
( ... )
The sad irony being that it's the technological fruits of the West that makes it possible to simply "teleport" those jobs to America. We must defend our technology from being used against the cause of freedom anywhere, if we can help it. We should save lives if we can without a technical sacrifice, that is, it's in our interests to save people, generally. ANd it certainly is. There may be over a billion Chinese people, but I am grateful for every single one of them who works hard making things for the market in order to support a family and have a decent life: every one of them, in the full moral nature of their dedication to their lives on Earth that is represented in their drive to material success. This is a drive that I guarantee you is a far healthier desire than most that have moved the rulers of humanity, other than those who have rapturously dedicated their lives to freedom's great blessings for our kind.
Finishing this sentence, with reference to the billion or so Chinese many of whom are newly and avidly participating in free market captialism:
The Chinese industrial workers, in the full moral nature of their dedication to their lives on Earth that is represented in their drive to material success, are the essence of the American Dream. I would be as horrified to see one of them jumping from my beloved Twin Towers as I was at seeing American businessfolk do so.
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One, the free people who go to such countries do so at significant risk. A blue passport does not confer immunity to oppression -- and people not thoroughly familiar with the informal rules of the society in which they are living have a harder time evading both the informal and the formal rules. If they try to compensate for that, they may end up living more cautiously than the locals. To ensure that foreign workers are kept under control, some countries (including, I think, the UAE) require them to surrender their passports to their employers.
Two, in some countries, such as the UAE, Westerners are likely to end up living and working entirely inside Western enclaves, with little contact with the local people. An American in Dubai is, I suspect, likely to interact a lot more with British, Russian and American professionals and Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino servants (and perhaps an Indian or Filipino professional or two) than with Emiratis.
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The Chinese industrial workers, in the full moral nature of their dedication to their lives on Earth that is represented in their drive to material success, are the essence of the American Dream. I would be as horrified to see one of them jumping from my beloved Twin Towers as I was at seeing American businessfolk do so.
If anyone needs unions, it's Communist countries.
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