It's a pretty weak hit job honestly. So people immigrate, they have children, and then the number of diaspora and remittances multiply? Wow, basic math is so revolutionary. Is that really a story? Does this really have any context? Maybe they could have compared Kerala to Banglore, which was a colonial manufacturing base before transformed into the IT capital it is now (soon with branches in Atlanta).
It also completely ignores the 1000 years of Jews, Xtians, Muslims, and Hindus living together, and the fact that Kerala has been a point of migration between the Gulf and India before Jesus and Mohammed wiped their bottoms. Wikipedia "Nasrani" and have fun from there.
Funny unrelated story, maybe : I've only been to Kerala twice, and the time I went in 99, for some reason in a little village shop, among maybe 30-40 english books, HALF of them were dodgy copies of Ayn Rand! and there are still Hammer and Sickle's everywhere!
On 9/6/07, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, September 6, 2007 3:45 pm, Mr. WD wrote:
>
> > But is it true that much of Kerala's
> > human development has actually been purchased by sending a large portion
> > of the population abroad to work horrific jobs in the Persian Gulf?
>
> It isn't true, and many of those jobs aren't that horrific, compared to
> the excruciating grind of peasant labor. I'm no India expert, but I do
> know Kerala had much better social indicators even before the expatriate
> boom. The south and coasts of India were always more developed than the
> interior, had more sophisticated trading networks and mercantile
> economies, etc. As for why India is poor: 350 years of godawful British
> imperialism.
>
> > [NY Times article] The debate about Kerala
> > is a debate about future strategies across the impoverished world.
>
> Realistically, the global periphery has to find ways of rising up against
> global neoliberalism and local comprador elites, and joining with the
> developmental states of China, Vietnam, Russia and Venezuela. The Times
> isn't about to say this, of course.
>
> > [NY Times article] The $5 billion that foreign workers send home augment
> the
> > state's economic output by nearly 25 percent.
>
> This is true of most peripheral nations, from the Philippines to El
> Salvador, and from Senegal to Pakistan. Central Asians work in Moscow,
> Central Americans work in New York City. The workers of the world are
> moving to places where, potentially, they could unite.
>
> -- DRR
>
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