Is IBM An American Company Anymore?

Source: international herald tribune

The work force at International Business Machines Corp. grew 8 percent in 2006, with most of the rise coming in India, where the technology company has been on a hiring binge in recent years.

The figures were disclosed Tuesday in IBM’s annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. IBM noted that at the end of 2006 it employed 355,766 people, up from 329,373 one year earlier.

Its base in India was 52,000 people — up from 36,000 one year earlier. *snip*

That makes India the second-largest center for IBM, trailing only the United States, where IBM’s work force rose slightly to 127,000. India is so key to IBM that Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano held his annual analysts’ briefing there last June rather than in the traditional location of New York.

And if the answer is yes, how much longer do you think that will remain true?

Randall Burns at Vdare sez:

Now, what this means is that IBM is dumping its American work force–particularly its American technical work force. The SEC doesn’t require reporting on the immigration status of employees, but I think if we could get figures on the number of H-1b/L-1 guest workers, green card holders and naturalized citizens being employed by IBM in recent years, it would be a safe bet that the number of Americans born in the USA that have been employed by IBM in recent years has gone down significantly. I would seriously question the ability of IBM management to get key information at this point without relying heavily on sources of data that may be skewed by ethnic and national nepotism. Can IBM really guarentee the security of software systems developed in India?

The thing is, IBM is major US government contractor–and a major corporate welfare recipient. Does it really make sense for the American people to do that kind of business with what is essentially a foreign company?

Precisely, do we hand out sensitive government contracts to foreign companies? Hannitized this is your field, do we? And if we do, should we?

Does it strike anyone as the height of prudence to allow what are rapidly becoming foreign companies in all but flag to pretend they are American businesses? I have no peculiar beef with India but let's not forget that they have their own homegrown Jihad problems. Do we know that Jihadi's aren't finding their way into these companies on H1-b's?

Economics is also border security, not to mention war waged in other ways. To think that economics exists on some other plain than any other dealing between nations is dangerously foolish and naive.

If IBM wishes to become an Indian company, well, Godspeed to them. They are more than welcome to pick up stakes and go, what I have a problem with is their insistence on pretending to be an American corporation as they busily do everything in their power to make that proposition a lie.

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