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Would this be true if high skilled legal immigration system in USA wasn’t broken? If IBM had zero restrictions on importing skilled labor, IBM USA would probab

• majewsky 9y ago
  Cost of living is still higher in the US, so you have to pay them more in the US than in India. The actual question is if these increased salary costs are offset by productivity improvements from not having to communicate across timezones etc. There's probably no single answer to that.
• indubitable 9y ago
  At a high enough level a company's customers and employees are one and the same. Exploiting labor can lead directly to a tragedy of the commons. If all companies were able to pursue the cheapest labor possible on a worldwide scale, then the overall disposable income in this nation would proportionally decrease. That income is precisely what ends up being used to purchase a company's products and fund their ventures. In the big picture - when all companies pay less, they end up earning less. This is also ignoring local effects. As domestic workers are displaced by the cheapest workers across the world, unemployment would increase. As wages decrease and revenues fall you have the ideal scenario to start an economic depression. Rising unemployment and an economy in depression is something that is extremely difficult to stop once it starts. Fear of even the hint of this happening is part of the reason we're already flirting with ostensibly insane economic measures ranging from quantitative easing to negative interest rates.