The open borders discussion relates to that article about finding more temporary foreign workers to do the vegetable picking in Australia because locals won’t work cheap enough.
Whenever I see something like that I always think hmm, it’s only a stop-gap measure until globalisation progresses sufficiently that everyone is a “local” and unwilling to do gruelling work for low wages, and what then?
The usual answer is robots, and that any exploitation is a temporary measure until the robots become cheaper, which must be a comforting thought for anyone who had the misfortune to be born in a low-income area.
So you’re either positing the existence of a permanent underclass of servants divided on roughly racial lines – and god knows that sounds like a stable and healthy way to organise society for the long-term – or you’re just trying to squeeze in a bit more exploitation before the robots arrive and the game ends.
Become so National Technocratic that you base your development strategy on an expanding ring of underdeveloped countries that you build up into military allies following your ideology and willing to fight, balancing the level of unemployment in your own country by adjusting the rate at which countries are added to the bloc.
Take selected aspects of their culture such as architecture which are economically neutral, while purging harmful elements like first cousin marriage, genital mutilation, and normalized polygamy, in order to build national identities and pride for each of these countries. Get accused of turning them into theme park versions of themselves, plow through anyway because the people making those accusations are clueless and shilling for virtue points.
Challenge the liberal democrats for economic and cultural hegemony over Earth.
Admittedly, might be a bit too Imperialist, and you’d need a properly refined National Technocratic ideology to do it, with enough true believers in power to successfully execute it.
