What you said.

My little slice of the Japanese countryside is heavily invested in manufacturing. There are 6,000 Brazilian factory workers in my town. About 5,000 of them are out of work right now, and many have taken a government offer where they'll pay for your plane ticket if you leave the country and promise to not come back.

Meanwhile I'm in an air-conditioned office, just got a positive performance evaluation, will receive my bonus on time this summer, and have job security that the Pope would envy.

We don't even know how good we have it some days.

Historically, our job security beats the Papacy hands down. Even excluding the early Popes who were martyred in quick succession, the average papal tenure is under 8 years, with a fair number of murders and alleged murders. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes. So I think you're right about the Pope's envy :)

Regarding the job market, I do contract work in Colorado and have had no problems either. My programmer friends in the US, Europe, and Brazil are all gainfully employed. I think there's a chronic shortage of good programming talent that's not going away anytime soon.