Well, here's the problem in a nutshell:
There are a lot of Americans who are unemployed. Research tells us that these Americans are marginalized...minorities, rural populations, those with special needs, those with lower levels of education and educational opportunity, etc.
There are jobs that are being done and sometimes done badly by Indians, such as call center calls, which might be better served by Americans. Not anyone's fault...they're both reading scripts. Read that again: they're both reading scripts. An American accent gets your script read more effectively. No other difference.
Now we've got a lot of patriotic Americans who're asking why we don't solve both problems by not outsourcing those jobs, and filling them with the unemployed here in the US.
But, at the same time, we're allowing telecom legislation that further shackles any move to educate those populations, that kills any attempt to make them digitally literate, so that they *could* compete for those jobs. This makes it impossible for us to compete in a global marketplace, and makes it a certainty that those positions will continue to move overseas in larger and larger numbers.
Here's a real life example. I frequently provide contracted website development services, here in Chicago. If I touch a project, I generally start at $1k. Not too shabby for a community website, full content management system, easy end-user admin, community blogging / portal / forums, etc. You could turn one of those into AT if you had the right motivation. I add extras for custom design work, etc, but we'll take $1k as a baseline.
Now, as a business providing a service (as a contractor, I am a business, theoretically) I must provide a reasonable level of quality. If I do not, my clients will look elsewhere for a. higher quality at the $1k price range, or b. similar quality at lower prices.
If I am very well trained, have access to the latest tools, the best techniques, and the highest skill levels, I can continue to provide high quality services at competitive prices. An Indian firm often can't match the quality of some of my work, because they're not as up to date on open source content management systems or cutting edge internet marketing techniques. They're trained to build one ASP content management system, in house, and then resell that to everyone who asks, no matter what they ask for. So I have a high quality product, and charge a competitive price ... = I have clients.
Now, if I have no training, or little training, I have a problem. There's a guy here in Chicago who works with a nonprofit; I'm training him in how to use the Drupal content management system. He has no website design skills, no technical training, nothing but a very keen interest in technology. He's from a rough neighborhood, and goes to an inner city school in that neighborhood.
He, effectively, has *no* way to learn the things that I have learned over the next few years. None. There are no training opportunities that will get him from where he is now to where I am now. At best, he'll learn to build a few websites from template-driven programs. Someone asks him to script a custom email form, and he's lost.
If he enters the marketplace, how will he compete? He's representative of an entire collection of communities that we have disenfranchised. How do you expect these people to contribute to the technology workforce?
How will he ever compete with the competition from India? Sure, he's here local, and in person, but they have a much higher quality product, and more expertise. Since my product is even higher quality, and I have even more expertise (than many of them) or at least a similar level of expertise, I can score clients because I am here, in person, and can meet face to face. Without that baseline level of competitiveness, you have no option but to leave the industry. In '99, he could have been paid $25 an hour to help grandmothers set up hotmail account. Today, he's going to get booted out of the website development industry and into something else, something non-technological.
And then, patriotic Americans are going to look at him working in a factory and wonder why the hell their company is outsourcing website development work when perfectly good American workers are working for starvation wages or collecting unemployment. If we're not willing to change the conditions that prevent them from becoming digitally literate or technologically competent, then we have no one but ourselves to blame.
Braznor: If you cannot stand the hypocrisy of those who believe free trade is a one way street, then your cause would be better served by explaining your points lucidly and ignoring the flamers rather than flaming people yourself. The reason? No one pays attention to the idiot who calls names. We ignore him and keep reading, filtering it out. The guy who takes the time to make his point, and make his point well, gets more attention. You're never going to persuade someone by telling them their thread was a pile of dung to begin with. But I've convinced people by making a logical argument, sometimes by pointing out things they weren't aware of.
The catch? You have to make your point, and make it well. It has to stand up to criticism.
Alchemize: Thanks for the compliment. I actually haven't read Friedman yet, but I'm certainly planning to, if I ever have time after my nonstop volunteer commitments.
Dave.