If telecommuting can take work out of the office, what will stop it from taking work out of the country?
The coming decades may see a big rise in a new breed of electronic immigrants, people who live in far-flung countries but do much of the work of the Information Age for dirt cheap.
They'll be able to "cross borders" with impunity. No border patrol will be able to stop them. No customs fees or tariffs will be charged. They'll simply link into the worldwide information infrastructure just as anybody else. They'll be able to work as quickly and easily as if they were sitting in a cubicle 100 yards down the hall. They'll instantaneously communicate with their bosses, probably through the aids of video links.
The only difference is that they will be used to standards of living far below those of people in developed countries, and they'll be more desperate for jobs that pay almost anything. They'll bid for work that may pull down the wage levels of the entire pool of world labor. It could be a nightmare for the West's unionized labor, especially in such fields as clerical work.
We're already seeing some forms of it. Companies in the 1980s were able to take advantage of improved and cheaper telecommunications to relocate their data-entry divisions to the friendlier business climates and lower-cost labor markets in the United States. That's partly why Citibank was able to pull its credit card processing unit out of New York City and relocate to Sioux Falls, S.D., in 1981.
What happens in the 1990s and beyond, when companies decide to take advantage of even newer telecommunications, pull up stakes again and keep going to the Third World?
The Caribbean countries already are beginning to take over some low-end data-entry jobs. In the early 1990s, one U.S. airline paid workers in Barbados less than the U.S. minimum wage to input data that workers in Arizona and Oklahoma once handled for $8.50 an hour. Workers in Haiti are doing word processing for a range of U.S.-based insurance companies.
And the service workers at the low end of the totem pole won't be the only ones threatened by electronic immigrants. It will start to threaten those on the upper end, too.
Take the case of Bangalore, India -- a relatively small, pleasant city that's fast becoming that country's version of Silicon Valley. Many American high-tech firms, including IBM, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola, are setting up operations there.
The main draw is the vast pool of highly trained engineers and technicians, many of them educated in the West, who will pump out computer software code for a fraction -- sometimes one-tenth -- of the salaries of their Western counterparts.
The Bangalore programmers now mostly do the detail work that fills out the overall systems that are still designed in the West. They also are becoming the night shift for software design teams in the United States, who ship rush jobs over the Net to teams in Bangalore. By the time the U.S. team arrives back at work the next morning, the software is a day closer to finish.
But India and other countries like it have plenty of drawbacks that will limit the flow of work there. For example, Bangalore can't rely on steady electrical power, and companies must have backup generators.
And the Net is a two-way street that may bring much high-end knowledge work into the United States. Ultimately we may not be overly concerned about electronic immigrants, just as today we're not too concerned about illegal immigrants picking vegetables or washing dishes in restaurants.
Almost no one in the United States will want to do that digital grunt work anyway.
