Stealing Our Jobs

Not only is American industry sending our jobs overseas at an unprecedented rate to save on the cost of of American wages (with active government encouragement), but it's even cheaper to use use the wombs of foreigners to have surrogate babies:

As temp jobs go, Saroj Mehli has landed what she feels is a pretty sweet deal. It's a nine-month gig, no special skills needed, and the only real labor comes at the end — when she gives birth.
If everything goes according to plan, Mehli, 32, will deliver a healthy baby early next year. But rather than join her other three children, the newborn will be handed over to an American couple who are unable to bear a child on their own and are hiring Mehli to do it for them.

She'll be paid about $5,000 for acting as a surrogate mother, a bonanza that would take her more than six years to earn on her salary as a schoolteacher in a village near here. The American who has hired Mehli said he and his wife had discussed all options for having a child in light of her hysterectomy 10 years ago. Surrogacy was one possibility, but at a minimum of $20,000 to $25,000 in the U.S., "the expenses involved were almost beyond my reach," said the man....

Others aren't so sure about the moral implications, and are worried about the exploitation of poor women and the risks in a land where 100,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. Rich couples from the West paying Indian women for the use of their bodies, they say, is distasteful at best, unconscionable at worst.

Both sides of the debate agree that the fertility business in India, including "reproductive tourism" by foreigners, is potentially enormous.... the Indian Council of Medical Research estimates that helping residents and visitors beget children could bloom into a nearly $6-billion-a-year industry.

America is just too expensive for everything. How do we continue to exist?
Posted on The Human Stain