Y'know, it's even tougher to be a fair-minded tolerant liberal and go through this shit. If I were a typical conservative, I could just rail about them damn furriners taking mah jerb.
But shit, it's not like these guys wake up in the morning and say "How can I steal a job from an American today?"
They wake up and thank Krishna/Allah/whoever that they were able to get a college education and training and certifications and have a job better than elephant dung-scooper. They want a better life for them and their family, and there's absolutely no reason to be mad at them.
But all the same, I can't help feeling conflicted considering that I started training one of our new project managers this week, a very nice guy a little younger than me from Tamil Nadu who lives in Mumbai. The idea that I might be training someone who will one day displace me, through no fault of either of us....it's just weird. (And it wouldn't be the first time I've done that.)
And I can (and do) rail against senior management, but in a purely economic rationale, it makes sense. There's a big labor cost disparity between US/European labor and offshore labor, especially Indian offshore labor. The problem is that taken to the logical extreme, eventually no one in the US will have a job because we're all too expensive. Which means no one to buy all those fancy gadgets and services that the Third World is now making for us. The only thing left will be jobs that cannot be outsourced or automated.
It's going to be a weird fucking inversion when there's thinktanks and advanced fab plants in Africa, and the bulk of jobs in the US and Europe are subsistence farming and arts/crafts.