Over the last month, United States politicians and citizens across the globe have found a convenient new villain: the foreign multinational corporation. A furor continues raging here in the U.S. over Dubai Ports World, a government-owned firm from the United Arab Emirates that has received provisional approval to operate ports in six U.S. cities.

And a lot of people here in the U.S. are…well…they're pretty damn mad. To say nothing, too, of feeling a little insecure.

Indeed, the controversial Dubai Ports deal has raised concerns about foreigners buying American asset.

Of course, business xenophobia is anything but new. In the 1980s, Americans fretted about Japanese takeovers of America's prestige brands because, at the time, Japan was an economic juggernaut swallowing pieces of America. Before that, Europeans worried about American conglomerates in the '70s. And, as a Slate piece on Tuesday noted, "the less said about the Dutch or British East India Trading Companies, the better."

We now know that most of those fears were unfounded. Japan turned out to be what NPR's Day to Day referred to as "a toothless tiger."

According to Slate:

Political resistance to foreign takeovers is not all that shocking, even in the supposedly laissez-faire United States. Foreign corporations are the perfect political bogeyman. By definition, they are un-American. Critics are usually correct when they claim that these firms are only concerned with making money (our multinationals would never act like that!!), and if they are state-owned, well, then their purposes must be even more nefarious. The targets of many of these takeovers — infrastructure, utilities, steel — are perceived to have some strategic value, which makes ordinary citizens even more sensitive.

In the years since the '70s and '80s, however, something rather odd happened. Other countries have been slowly buying up pieces of America, "from American supermarkets owned by the Dutch to American hotels owned by the British." Most of these nations are clearly U.S. allies. (Hey, likely no one wakes in the middle of the night, with glacial-cold sweat, terrified of the threat posed by America's biggest foreign investor: Canada.) Yet security concerns invariably do crop up.

For instance, we nearly are dependent on India for much of our software. "So is that a vulnerability?" asks Harlan Ullman, a senior advisor at a Washington D.C. think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Is that something we should worry about?"

The answer is not always so simple. Does "national security" mean only protecting against terrorist attacks? Or does it extend to economic and energy security as well? Some U.S. lawmakers clearly think the answer to the latter is "yes," as they recently squashed China's bid to buy the American oil firm, UNOCAL.

This problem won't be going away anytime soon. We rely on foreign investment and foreign lending to finance the out-of-freakin'-control U.S. trade deficit. And because our trade deficit has to be financed by foreign capital, one form those capital inflows will take is the acquisition of U.S. firms. If anything, the problem will worsen as more foreign multinationals emerge from the developing world.

If you're struggling to understand the key points of the controversial Dubai Ports purchase, check out NPR's simplified and straightforward Q&A.

If you dig media rhetoric and diverse opinions, look no further than NPR's Differences of Opinion.

References

So, You Want To Buy a Strategic American Company …
by Daniel Drezner
Slate, Feb. 28, 2006

Foreign Investors: Who Poses a Threat?
by Eric Weiner
NPR, Day to Day, Feb. 24, 2006

Additional

No Safe Harbor Here
by Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek (via MSNBC), March 6, 2006 issue