Let's leave for a moment the sunny economic news in May's jobs report (an impressive 280,000 jobs were added last month) and enter the shadows of a disturbing story that recently appeared in the New York Times. The reporter, Julia Preston, explains that around 250 American tech workers employed by Walt Disney World were laid off and immediately replaced by cheaper ones from India.

To add lots of salt to injury, Disney reportedly offered severance bonuses only to those who agreed to train their replacements. The savings from using immigrants in jobs of this kind are estimated to be between 25 percent and 49 percent, according to a professor of public policy at Howard University. The immigrant tech workers enter the US job market by way of a temporary work visa, H-1B. A total of 85,000 such visas are granted each year. Preston claims that Microsoft, Facebook, and Google want the government to increase the annual quota because they have many positions that the present American labor market cannot fill. They need to tap into the global labor market.

So, in the past, Americans saw lots of blue-collar jobs go to other countries. In the future, Americans might see lots of white-collar jobs filled by people from other countries. We can expect that a good part of the blame for this development will be placed on immigrant workers (many of whom have brown skin) and not on the structure of things or the greed of corporations or the limits of American democracy. But what the situation at Disney makes very clear is that the workers of the current and still expanding neoliberal global order will always be easily exploited if their political and democratic concepts are limited to national borders. Marx knew this 150 years ago.