Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [111]
From the standpoint of helping the least advantaged, a case could be made for open immigration. And yet, even people with egalitarian sympathies hesitate to endorse it.52 Is there a moral basis for this reluctance? Yes, but only if you accept that we have a special obligation for the welfare of our fellow citizens by virtue of the common life and history we share. And this depends on accepting the narrative conception of personhood, according to which our identity as moral agents is bound up with the communities we inhabit. As Walzer writes, “It is only if patriotic sentiment has some moral basis, only if communal cohesion makes for obligations and shared meanings, only if there are members as well as strangers, that state officials would have any reason to worry especially about the welfare of their own people… and the success of their own culture and politics.”53
Is it unfair to “Buy American”?
Immigration is not the only way that American jobs can be lost to outsiders. These days, capital and goods cross national boundaries more easily than people do. This, too, raises questions about the moral status of patriotism. Consider the familiar slogan “Buy American.” Is it patriotic to buy a Ford rather than a Toyota? As cars and other manufactured goods are increasingly produced through global supply chains, it becomes harder to know exactly what counts as an American-made car. But let’s assume we can identify goods that create jobs for Americans. Is that a good reason to buy them? Why should we be more interested in creating jobs for American workers than for workers in Japan or India or China?
In early 2009, the U.S. Congress passed and President Obama signed an economic stimulus package of $787 billion. The law contained a requirement that public works funded by the bill—roads, bridges, schools, and public buildings—use American-made steel and iron. “It just makes sense that, where possible, we try to stimulate our own economy, rather than the economy of other countries,” explained Senator Byron Dorgan, (D-N.D.), a defender of the “Buy American” provision.54 Opponents of the provision feared it would prompt retaliation against American goods by other countries, worsen the economic downturn, and wind up costing American jobs.55 But no one questioned the assumption that the purpose of the stimulus package should be to create jobs in the United States rather than overseas. This assumption was made vivid in a term economists began using to describe the risk that U.S. federal spending would fund jobs abroad: leakage. A cover story in BusinessWeek focused on the leakage question: “How much of Obama’s mammoth fiscal stimulus will ‘leak’ abroad, creating jobs in China, Germany, or Mexico rather than the U.S.?”56
At a time when workers everywhere are facing job losses, it is understandable that American policy-makers take as their first priority the protection of American jobs. But the language of leakage brings us back to the moral status of patriotism. From the standpoint of need alone, it is hard to argue for helping unemployed U.S. workers over unemployed workers in China. And yet few would quarrel with the notion that Americans have a special obligation to help their fellow citizens contend with hard times.
It is difficult to account for this obligation in terms of consent. I never agreed to help steelworkers in Indiana or farm workers in California. Some would argue that I’ve implicitly agreed; because I benefit from the complex scheme of interdependence represented by a national economy, I owe an obligation of reciprocity to the other participants in this economy—even though I’ve never met them, and even though I’ve never actually exchanged any goods or services