The U.S. Census Bureau reports annual figures on U.S. trade with China.

This About.com article explains factors behind the U.S.-China trade imbalance.

The Institute for International Economics spells out the U.S.-China balance sheet.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports to the record 2005 U.S. trade deficit.

CFO Magazine's business perspective on trade between the U.S. and China.

The L.A. Times reports on the International Monetary Fund’s assessment of the U.S. trade deficit.

The Washington Post profiles an American importer and an Asian exporter.

CNN explains how Washington’s partially to blame in its trade deficit with Beijing.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provides an excellent, if slightly dated, background on the underlying factors.

The China Daily News offers the Chinese perspective.

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One episode that really spoke to me focused on a young man, who once worked as a computer programmer in the United States. Having lost his job to an outsourcing company in India, “Chris” accepts the challenge of living with an Indian family in Bangalore for a month, during which he tries to gain employment in his chosen profession.

Chris is surprised to find that he lacks the local-industry experience to qualify for a programmer job, so he reluctantly accepts a job in a call center, where dozens of Indian nationals answer customer service calls from customers of U.S.-based companies. Before he gets started, he has to attend classes where his fellow workers learn to speak with an American accent, master frequently asked questions, and generally providing the illusion that callers have reached a call center based in a U.S. city.

Despite the excellent production values, this episode really upset me. I am just one example of an American worker whose job was once sold out by an American corporation, so you’ll forgive me if I have a skewed point of view. But even if I am biased, foreign outsourcing is bad for America, and that's bad for the world.

American companies claim they are just trying to remain competitive by controlling their labor costs. But I would argue that for every American worker who loses a job, the economy loses a consumer. And that’s simply not sustainable.

Another reason to oppose foreign outsourcing is that workers in less developed countries have little or no protection under fair labor laws. Labor standards here in the U.S. and other industrialized nations have evolved over centuries, and the labor movement has resulted in a set of expectations we have come to expect from employers. These include laws against practices that are tantamount to indentured servitude or slavery. Those values come at a price, one that has been absorbed into our cost of doing business. To allow foreign workers to labor under inequitable conditions is to endorse a system of oppression and to profit from it.

When U.S. firms send their factories, call centers, and other operations outside the U.S., they commit a form of treason that threatens to upset our way of life. In justifying such exports, corporations say they are simply getting a better deal on labor, an arrangement that allows them to remain competitive. But in reality, they hurt the American worker, whose taxes finance the system of government under which those companies enjoy protection and security. If not for American taxpayers, those corporations could not exist. After all, the American worker cannot possibly compete with foreign workers, who live under an inherently cheaper cost of living.

I sympathize with foreign companies’ desire to compete with American firms. However, we cannot continue to pretend that it’s a global marketplace. The trade imbalance between cheap labor/cheap products/abusive labor practice nations and the U.S. is compelling. China stands out as the America’s worst trade partner. We import more than $200 billion dollars’ worth of goods from China than export every year. All told, Chinese goods account for about 26% of the U.S. trade deficit. The myth of a global marketplace is a convenient lie, one that sells out our own nation's workforce to build up another’s.

This deficit is not limited to an imbalance of commerce. Rather than exporting the ideals and values that made America strong, we are importing the values of regimes that dismantle the individual rights. By rewarding firms that export jobs, factories, and industries abroad, the U.S. government betrays contempt for its people. Inequitable trade erodes the value of the American dollar, the dignity of American workers, and the innovation of their spirit. We deceive ourselves to believe it will stop there; for as the U.S. goes, so goes the world.