From Planting Flags to Building Factories, Imperialism Today

      Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, colonizing the Americas. Colonialism is defined as the exploitation by a stronger country of a weaker country and it continues to happen in the present day United States.  Although colonialism no longer involves discovering new land and marking territory by planting a flag in the soil, it can be seen though the great amount of outsourcing America does as a strategy to gain cheap labor. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden”, describes to readers that the white men taking over the Philippines felt that they were benefitting the natives but in reality, they were harming their way of life and using their land for its resources. Similarly, a modern day example of imperialism that impacts my life is the corporate colonialism that I experience through America’s job outsourcing and use of cheap labor, making me feel morally responsible for the low wages and dangerous working conditions I indirectly support when I purchase items manufactured overseas.

            America outsources its jobs to other countries like China as a way of producing goods at a cheap cost. This impacts my life in both a positive and negative way. It saves me money because the products are less expensive due to the low cost of production of the clothes. The clothes cost less to produce because people working overseas do not have a minimum wage like we do in the United States and agree to work for lower wages. However, job outsourcing impacts me in a negative way also because corporations are giving jobs to people over seas, causing America’s unemployment to increase, making it more difficult for me to find a summer job. For instance, when I call for information about making hotel reservations at a corporate hotel chain I tend to be connected to a person living in a third world country. The corporation would prefer to higher somebody overseas because they agree to work for low wages that Americans like me would not agree to work for due to the concept of minimum wage. The reason that this is considered corporate colonialism is because America is taking advantage of other countries for its own benefit, using the other country’s resources for America’s gain. Although American corporations feel that they are providing foreigners with jobs and a source of income, they are exploiting the workers of their resources and taking advantage of the low wages given to the laborers.  This modern day way of thinking is similar to that of the white men who colonized the Philippines because they felt that they were colonizing “to serve [their] captives’ need” (“The White Man’s Burden”) but really they were ruining an already established community for their own advantage.

            I feel morally bad knowing that I would not be in as economically comfortable if it was not for the outsourced labor that the United States takes advantage of for its own gain of cheaper resources. Similarly, numerous amounts of Native American’s lives were changed for the worse to advance the colonizers goals of discovering gold, spreading Christianity, and gaining fame. Corporations, like Wal-Mart, that take advantage of cheap labor exist in today’s business world as a modern version of the ‘White Man’s Burden’, impacting my life when I put on an article of clothing or search for a job.