In our increasingly global economy, India is outsourcing work receive from companies in the United States and to Mexico, China, and . . . the United States. Chief among these technology services companies are Infosys and Wipro, whose legions of programmers work across the globe.
In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American "states which are less developed." (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)
For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.
The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.
It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.
What does this say about the sad state of our economy in certain states that we are "insourcing" (according to Friedman) jobs, moving jobs around the globe just to have them come back home, at reduced rates? Especially now that the Canadian loonie has surpassed the American dollar for the first time in 30 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if foreign companies were looking at opening more offices in the United States to take advantage of the weak dollar and the weak economy.
I don’t blame Indian companies for spotting a niche and filling it – they have sensed a demand in the market and marketed to it in an appropriate fashion, using the knowledge and experience that they gained from servicing American corporations. They are becoming increasingly versatile in a hyper-speed economy and anticipating needs.
Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.
"We have pioneered this movement of work," Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. "These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries."
What is particularly fascinating is the reverse "brain drain" of U.S. college students who choose to go work for Infosys over Google: "Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices."
And so the flow of human capital shuttles across the globe according to the whims of corporations. We have gotten used to being the pinnacle of education and business, and that has made us less innovative and more cautious. The common occurrence of talented international graduate students seeking our shores has abated as visa processing has slowed to a trickle. The brightest and smartest from around the globe are choosing to just stay home, and I would argue that this is ultimately bad for American innovation and growth – look at the wealth of knowledge that immigrants and their children have brought to our country, driven by their immigrant experiences. Included in their ranks are civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, AIDS researcher extraordinaire Dr. David Ho, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Neal Katyal, lead counsel in Hamdan v Rumsfeld and the son of immigrant parents.
Ultimately, this is the parting gift of the Bush administration – an economy so depressed that Indian corporations can afford to hire American workers to do jobs for wages that their East or West Coast brethren in major cities wouldn’t accept. It is a new loop in the globalization "shell game," and represents the lowered expectations that we have been trained to numbly accept over the past seven years from an incompetent president and his administration. It will take years to prop our economy back up, and the first step is electing a Democratic president.