> Although discussion of this topic has most often
> centered around IT workers, the targeted job
> categories are not limited to that field. Anyone in
> the US who works in front of a computer and pushes
> data points about, not just those whose jobs involve
> management or manipulation of the machines, can, it is
> apparently believed, be replaced by someone sitting in
> front of a computer in Bangalore, India or perhaps
> Moscow.
This is certainly the case. I have many friends in the lower tiers of the financial industry, and they are surrounded by non-IT people here on H1-B visas, L1 visas and the like. Many of their back-office operations are being "off-shored". Call centers are being off-shored as well en masse, these are service jobs though not necessarily white collar. Another effect of that is IT call centers are often a stepping stone to a more white collar IT job, with them moving to India, that stepping stone for Americans is being removed.
If we look at one list for professional visas (which does NOT include all professional workers in the US on visa currently) we get this breakdown:
Business, accountants and auditors 7497 Computer, programmer/analyst 31874 Engineering, electrical 2138 Healthcare, therapist physical 2977
IT predominates, but other professions are either having foreign workers come in, or are outsourcing them. In the late 1990's, with so much focus on growth, visas to bring in skilled labor predominated. Now that the focus is on cutting labor costs, outsourcing to India or Eastern Europe is popular.
There seems to be kind of a Catch-22 at work here I think. It seems to me, especially when looked at relatively, the old Eastern Europe and India invested more in it's workers in terms of education and making them more productive than the US did or does. However, the USA and Western Europe were always willing to pay more for these skilled workers, thus many of them would move to Western Europe or the USA. So the capitalist system is relative to it's own GDP versus the more socialist systems, unable to produce skilled workers as well as the more socialist systems, but it is able to pay them higher wages, thus killing the benefits of the educational system. After all, Ulbricht built the Berlin Wall not to keep plumbers and farmers from crossing to Western Europe, but the doctors, engineers and other professionals that the socialist education systems had invested so much time in. Or at least that's what an East German communist once told me, as well as a US military analysis I once read as well.
Lance