If American workers got paid American-level wages and yet lived in, say, Nicaragua, it would make some sense to directly and simply compare their vastly different incomes, but they don't (with the exception of managers of American multinationals, aid workers, etc.), so the fact that "our poverty line is at the 98th percentile of the world income distribution" in itself doesn't say much.
Nominal wages are of course higher in more developed capitalist nations than less developed ones, but so are the price and the extent of the prime necessaries of life as naturally and historically developed, the cost of training the laborers, the productiveness of labor, and so on, to list some of the factors mentioned by Marx in his discussion of "National Differences of Wages" (in Chapter 22 of _Capital_ Vol. 1).
One of the problems of imperialism is that it generally strengthens the hands of the exploiting class (landlords, capitalists, financiers, etc., of the imperial centers as well as of the periphery), often especially backward sectors of the class (that is, the sectors of the class least interested in innovation, improved productivity, expansion of the home market, etc. in short, national development on the periphery), vis-a-vis the working class, peasants, and agricultural laborers of nations subject to imperialism, retarding or deforming or sometimes even reversing national development. (Afghanistan is a good example of that. CIA-sponsored mujahedeen defeating Soviet-backed Afghan modernizers set back the nation by at least a century!)
National differences in wages have thus historically developed, as have different levels and forms of national development. If national differences become smaller, will American workers be worse off than now? That depends on what causes national differences to shrink -- whether it's the leveling down or leveling up. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>