Globalizátion: The irrational fear that someone in China will take your job

Introduction: Just How Global Are We?

Globalization is a big deal. It envelops us, like the weather. To borrow the reactions of an early reader of this manuscript, "We sense it. We live it. We hear it in the voice on the phone. We see it in the closing of local shops and the opening of supermarkets with French names. We certainly experience it talking with the help desk, when the 800 number we called is clearly answered in some exotic place eight or ten time zones away from us." A nightly program on a major news channel is devoted to the perils of globalization. A search of Amazon.com for books with globalization in the title returns over 4,000 names, and the catalogue of the New York Public Library has almost 500 (with this book yet to be included).

But when we leave the indefinite we of this statement and coolly examine our own specific lives, these feelings look more like fantasy than fact. We (the authors) live in one of the great global cities (New York) and are affiliated with a great global university (Columbia). Yet in most of the things we do, we neither sense nor see nor experience lives substantially different from the ones we led before globalization permeated the atmosphere and the airwaves. The balance between foreign and domestic, global and local, exotic and familiar, has not been dramatically altered.

More students, especially doctoral candidates, come from overseas, but that trend has a long history. The flood of foreigners doesn't apply to education in general, ...