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Immigration
A government’s loosening or tightening of restrictions upon work visas for foreign individuals does prevent outsourcing. Outsourcing, especially “knowledge process outsourcing,” may be due to emerging labor shortages in the enterprise customer’s home market. As a result, the subject of immigration and outsourcing is complex. Immigration law is interwoven with public policy considerations, freedom of trade in services, the right of establishment and national treatment under bilateral treaties of friendship, commerce and navigation that may date for more than a century or two. Accordingly, when selecting foreign countries as sources of outsourced labor and services, enterprise customers and their advisers should evaluate the web of laws, treaties and politics that might impair continuity of service under a global services model.
Individual labor may be entirely circumvented by the use of software and web-enabled self-service that links an enterprise’s employees directly with transactional processing operations conducted anywhere.
Policymakers considering restrictions on “importation” of labor via work permits thus confront the reality that “importation” of labor may occur by telecommuting and telecommunications. As a consequence, policy restrictions on international outsourcing may shift to regulation of the services themselves, which would serve as an “equal opportunity” barrier to both domestic and foreign service providers.
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