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It's hard to tell whether foreign investment is good or bad.
Rarely does a day pass without some important person expressing deep concern about how we'll lose control of our destiny if the Canadians buy more office buildings, the Arabs acquire more farmland, the Japanese purchase more ski resorts, and the Michiganders procure a bigger stake in the Nuggets. So foreign investment must be bad.
But then again, when he isn't entertaining wealthy foreigners, our governor is jetting about the planet. He's trying to attract more outside investment in Colorado. So foreign investment must be good, right?
Along the same line, you keep reading that America is being overwhelmed by immigrants from other lands, and that has people worried, too. But if history is any guide, neither matter is worth losing sleep over.
Foreign investment? Our nation was literally founded on
it. There wouldn't be a USA if the French and Dutch
venture capitalists
of 1780 had not financed a
transatlantic revolution.
In the myth, the American West was opened by hard-working prospectors and homesteaders who were beholden to no foreign interests.
In actual fact, the financing for the first major Western enterprise, fur trapping and trading, came from London and Paris.
A century ago, the capital to build our railroads and irrigation systems sometimes came from Boston or New York. But more often, our infrastructure is a result of gilders from Amsterdam, pounds from London, and francs from Antwerp.
That archetypical American hero, the cowboy of the Old West, generally rode for a big outfit like Prairie Land & Cattle Co., whose head offices were in Scotland. In 1881, a parliamentary committee reported that British investors could expect annual returns of 33 percent in the American cattle industry.
A historian notes that the largest cattle companies
operating in the country during this period were owned by
British or Scottish financiers,
and another mentions
that these investors were often bilked by American
promoters -- a Dutch syndicate dropped millions into a
prospectus which extolled the Staked Plains as a verdant
eden and showed steamboats coursing the Pecos River.
Despite the extensive foreign investment during the past, we still think we have something to say about what happens to us. Why would future foreign investment change that?
As for immigrants, consider notable American accomplishments.
We were the first to use electricity in a big way, because alternating current can be transmitted much farther than direct current. The man who figured out how to use alternating current was Charles Proteus Steinmetz, an immigrant.
The atomic bomb, another American first, was the product of Leo Szilard, born and raised in Budapest; Neils Bohr, a Dane; Enrico Fermi, an Italian -- the list goes on, and few of them were born in the USA.
The computer industry, which started in America?
Although there have been experiments in other directions,
the working computers of this world are all based on
something called the von Neumann architecture,
a
theory which was devised on these shores. However, its
creator was John von Neumann, born and educated in
Hungary.
These men became Americans to escape persecution in their native lands. Steinmetz was a socialist who fled a Prussian crackdown in 1889, and Hitler's wave of terror sent us scores of brilliant Europeans.
It appears that America has grown rich and powerful because we've been good at two things: 1) hustling money from foreign investors, and 2) putting up with a wide variety of people whose political beliefs or ancestry have become unacceptable at home.
Why tamper with a proven formula for success? Bring on the investors and the immigrants.
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