Big Business Using Digital "Illegal Immigrants" to Smuggle out Millions of  US Jobs, Calling it Outsourcing By Rob Kall OpEdNews.Com The outsourc

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Big Business Using Digital "Illegal Immigrants" to Smuggle out Millions of  US Jobs, Calling it Outsourcing

By Rob Kall

OpEdNews.Com

The outsourcing of Tech Jobs to India and China is one of the biggest threats to the US job economy. India is complaining about violating the spirit of free trade. But I see this massive assault on US jobs as either a failure or intentional choice of the Bush administration not to respond to a technological development that allows "wetback" workers to go digital, smuggling prime value American jobs without having to sneak across the border.

It used to be, if you wanted to hire a foreign worker, you had to apply to the immigration department to get a temporary work visa for this potential employee. Digital outsourcing has become a way that big business routine evades the process, so they can smuggle foreign labor (not laborers) into the US.

Eleven years ago, I discovered a a doctoral level biomedical engineer/programmer in  Siberia who'd developed published articles about unique software for biofeedback, unlike anything developed in the US. He wanted to work for my company, to develop a new kind of software unavailable anywhere in the world. I had to go through a major process, proving to the immigration department that I could not source a programmer in the US to do what he was doing. I had to provide the specifications for the job and then they immigration department put it out to see if they could find someone who could do the work. They found a few potential candidates who weren't even close.  Only after that exercise was I able to arrange a temporary work visa for this unique programmer.

But now, with the internet and satellite aided phone connections, it's possible to circumvent the immigration department and smuggle work to foreign workers, even though there are millions of Americans who can do the job.

We talk about the problems with illegal immigration. But over the last few years, technology has enabled corporations to hire foreign workers without having to deal with the immigration department. This is either a failure of the administration to respond to a new development in technology or a conscious choice by the administration to allow transnational and megacorporations to cut their costs by using labor from other countries.

The way I see it, using phone or internet lines to enable a worker in China or India to answer a phone call from a US location is virtually, digitally crossing a border, using a worker who doesn't have a green card, ie., breaking the law, just like hiring a maid without working papers might be considered illegal.

It should not be allowed to stand as is. If it is not a blatant violation of the immigration laws, then it is the use of a loophole that ought to be closed and closed fast.

Last year, it was predicted that the outsourcing business would grow five fold in the next few years, from about $11 billion a year up past $50 billion. Keep in mind that that $50 billion in pay to third world workers represents a loss of US jobs worth $44 billion now and $200 billion soon.  Those are American jobs racing to India, China and the Caribbean. Interestingly, I learned about the growth of outsourcing accidentally, while  researching a major electronic voting firm that had branched out. That voting firm had been involved in several shady elections where the democratic candidate predicted to win by the polls had been surprisingly beaten by Republican candidates. Perhaps that partially explains why this breach in the walls of immigration policy has "slipped past" the recognition of the Bush administration.

This issue and this problem will not go away. The Indian government  has attacked the US plan to ban outsourcing according to the Financial Times, "arguing it is a protectionist measure contrary to the spirit of free trade."

This is in response to the passage by the US senate of a bill that bans the outsourcing of federal work. The senate bill is a good beginning, but it does not go far enough. It should either ban or charge large tariffs (as Thom Hartmann suggested in a conversation) on outsourcing using phone or internet or other electronic means altogether, or, rather, change the immigration laws-- take them into the digital era-- so this kind of electronic outsourcing is labeled  as a violation of immigration laws. And Hartmann points out that even if we did pass legislation that banned outsourcing, companies could circumvent the laws by creating offshore corporations that would "sell" finished "products" to companies in the US.

Another problem is that tariffs are verboten in the world of WTO and NAFTA. There's no doubt that India will apply to the WTO for billions in damages if the senate bill is passed forbidding outsourcing of federal jobs. And the likelihood of a successful pursuit of damages would be even greater if a tariff were established. We need to pull out of the WTO and NAFTA or demand that they exclude outsourced labor.

On top of that, the Indian government plans to tax these transnational corporations, like GE and Morgan Stanley. That will be ironic. These "traitor" companies register "chimera" corporations in the Bahamas (60 minutes just covered this, using Haliburton as an example) that avoid US taxes. And now, the taxes may end up being collected by India for work done in response to phone calls dialed to US phone numbers, processing data generated in the US.

William Rivers Pitt, in an article published in truthout.org , reporting on the Iowa caucus campaign, described and recapped a stump speech by Dennis Kucinich:

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

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Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

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