Technology megacorporation Apple is preparing a plan to move the manufacturing of iPhones from China to India in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic

Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi had met with company executives earlier in the year to begin the process. Apple is looking to move up to $40 billion of manufacturing subsidiaries from China to the country within the next five years.

Somewhat curiously, Apple secured a generous exemption from America First tariff policies in March. The company doesn’t appear to be considering moving more manufacturing back to the United States after reconsidering its China-based business model, doubtlessly preferring to build its supply chain in other countries while making a lion’s share of its profits from American consumers.

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America First patriots and economic nationalists should be encouraged by the increased skepticism of China’s outsourcing and protectionism-based economic model in the light of coronavirus. But they should be equally concerned by the increasing tendency of major American corporations to consider India as the location to which they’ll relocate major industry and manufacturing.

India, which is set to surpass China as the world’s most populous country within the decade, could conceivably prove essential to a continuation of the neoliberal era in which global corporate elites decimated the manufacturing and middle-class economy of the United States by outsourcing industry to countries where cheap labor was readily available, all with the help of corporate-generous ‘free trade’ globalist economic policies.

In time, the country, which has a low-wage labor force that surpasses even that of China, could prove to be the foil for globalist elites to swiftly rebrand their China-based global economic model. Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos predicted that the 21st century would be an ‘Indian century’ in January.

The nation’s government is already intensely lobbying for increased free trade privileges with the United States, and aggressively funds influence campaigns to boost annual levels of H-1B visas, in addition to rigging the wage-depressing visa’s rules in order for Indian applicants to monopolize it.