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Etymology of "Virtual Immigration"

Web Version of this article is much easier to read and has far more links,
but the email version has several copied articles in case they disappear
from the net. 

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/01/25/etymology-of-virtual-immigration/

The Dallas Federal Reserve and the Wall Street Journal created quite an
internet buzz when they used the term "virtual immigration" to describe the
offshoring of jobs. The following excerpts were copied from the published
article on the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank website. The first two quotes
merely define what "virtual immigration" and seem innocent enough, but the
next two are very elitist in tone as immigration and offshore outsourcing
are reduced to commoditized financial transactions.

    Labor Market Globalization in the Recession and Beyond
    by W. Michael Cox, Richard Alm and Justyna Dymerska
    December 2009

    * Today’s computer and telecommunications technologies have provided
a way to circumvent barriers to labor market globalization’s traditional
mode -- the physical immigration that brings the workers to the work. This
virtual immigration moves the work rather than the workers, and it
typically involves the long-distance delivery of services.
    * Both physical and virtual immigration have contributed to
globalization of the labor force over the past quarter century. This
integration has largely taken place in good times, where unemployment has
been low and the number of jobs has been increasing, particularly in the
U.S. Recessions have been brief and shallow.
    * Virtual immigration is an intuitively satisfying concept for the
Information Age, but no country’s labor market reports measure it
explicitly. So how can we track it? Much of virtual immigrants’ work
involves importing or exporting specialized knowledge and information --
just the kind of intangibles that distinguish services from goods in
international trade.
    * For U.S. companies and entrepreneurs, virtual immigration creates
opportunities. Offshoring cuts production costs and enhances global
competitiveness, and U.S. services firms grow and profit by expanding
overseas. For workers, virtual immigration brings competition. U.S.
computer programmers vie with lower-wage rivals in India, while U.S.
lawyers, architects and consultants take on foreign countries’ homegrown
firms.

I was curious enough about the term "virtual immigration" that I decided to
research its etymology in order to gain insight on what it meant, how it
has been used in the past, and to hopefully discover who invented the term.
As it turns out, the term has been in use for quite awhile, mainly among
economists. The following essay is a summary of what I found, followed by a
conclusion.

Economist Diane Coyle published a paper in the UK in 1996 and in the U.S.
in 1997 titled,  "The Weightless World, Strategies for Managing the Digital
Economy". The book had an entire chapter devoted to the subject:

    Virtual immigration
    Barriers to migrants are rising, not falling, these days. But
technology will make borders futile.
    The combination of computer technology and cheap telecommunications means
the industrial world has "virtual" immigration. Any direct investment by a
Western company in the third world is a partial substitute for importing
cheap labour, but the benefits are offset to some extent by the cost of
transporting the goods . whether Nike shoes or Motorola printed circuit
boards back to the country in which they will be sold. When British Airways
bases its ticket sales operation in India, when American computer companies
like IBM employ programmers there, the transportation problem is
negligible. The economic effects will be just the same as if the companies
brought thousands of Indian workers to the UK or US.

    Virtual immigration is therefore cutting the wages of some groups of
workers in the industrial countries -- not just the nannies and domestics,
but employees in manufacturing and traded services.

Coyle came up with the novel idea of equating the immigration of foreign
workers with offshoring. In her view they are all manifestations of the
same thing. Coyle didn’t seem to think that the wage stagnation that
follows the offshoring of U.S. jobs and industries was necessarily a
negative thing. She said there may be benefits, like for instance the
workers in youthful countries could help fund the pensions of older workers
in the U.S. In retrospect I’m sure she would agree that idea didn’t
work out too well!

Coyle heavily references Paul Krugman in her book and her ideas on world
trade and immigration seems to be from the Krugman school of globalism.
Economists with this mindset seem to be concerned more with the aggregate
effect of offshoring instead of the local effects on individual workers.
It’s a cold way of looking at the world but not uncommon in academic
circles.

Coyle used the term "virtual immigration" in several different books and
essays. On December 27, 2000 she published the book "Governing the world
economy". On page 42 wrote she connected virtual immigration with with the
use of cheap labor.

    These shifts in production are controversial. Jobs in manufacturing are
axed in the home country while the company is suspected of exploitation in
the locations to which it has shifted to reduce costs. It is sort of
virtual immigration -- the work goes to the source of cheap labour, enabled
by information technology and communications, if the cheap labour cannot
come to the work.

Bill Gates and many other global corporatists have used the idea that
immigration and offshoring are equivalent. In his testimony in March 2008
to the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology he made the threat
that if he can’t get enough H-1B visas he will send the work to other
countries. What Gates did wasn’t without precedent because international
trade agreements equate the movement of people with goods and services
(read more about Mode 4 of GATS agreement).

Subsequent to Coyle’s writings the term "virtual immigration" gained
traction in papers that discussed offshoring. The following are a few
examples in a rough chronological order.

Economist Arnold Kling published an essay on March 9, 2001, "Great
Opportunities, No Bull" that offers a rationale for offshoring that would
definitely appeal to high rollers on Wall Street or Silicon Valley that
want to reduce labor costs so that they can buy expensive apartments.

    The cost of labor is very high in places like San Francisco and New
York. However, for executives, it may be necessary to locate in an
expensive area in order to stay in contact with critical business partners.

    The Internet makes it possible for a firm with a high-cost headquarters
location to reduce the cost of its routine labor. You can have clerical
work, software development, or customer service done remotely, with no loss
in turnaround time.

    Some of the most striking reductions in cost come from moving work
overseas, to countries like Ireland and India. Because immigration is
restricted, both by cultural and legal factors, wages are much lower
overseas for workers with comparable skills. The Internet makes possible
"virtual immigration," in which workers effectively join American firms
without leaving their home country.

    Many opportunities exist to facilitate and profit from virtual
immigration. You need to have contacts with companies in the United States
that have outsourcing opportunities as well as contacts with people
overseas who can organize pools of workers.

In, "The rise of the global economy", p. 294, by Michael Veseth, 2002,
describes virtual immigration as a way to cut labor costs without the
hassle of dealing with immigration. This excerpt from Kling’s book is so
callous it’s almost funny:

    Some companies bring the workers to the work, searching for computer
specialists willing to come to the United States. But virtual immigration,
where the workers stay put, has become far more common, and remains much
cheaper. The software unit of a single company, Tata Sons Ltd. of India,
has 5,000 developers, a maquiladora of the mind [emphasis added] that can
immediately deploy 100 techies on an American corporation’s mission.

A variation of the term "virtual immigration" is used by many universities
and research organizations. It’s a geeky phrase that they use to describe
online resources used as libraries for forms and documents that are be used
to obtain visas for the large numbers of foreign students and workers that
come to these institutions. The usage of the term "virtual immigration" in
this context would be considered a secondary definition. As an example, UT
Texas says this on their website:

    The Virtual Immigration Library contains all of the general handouts,
flyers and forms from the International Students and Scholars section of
the International Office.

The National Institutes of Health uses the term in a similar fashion to UT
Texas.

NIH FOREIGN SCIENTIST PROGRAM

    STUDY REPORT, April 4, 2001

    The virtual immigration library that contains information sheets on
each type of visa and their associated functions, such as work
authorizations, etc., and policy and procedures manuals and documents.

In 2005 economist Paul Craig Roberts warned about virtual immigration.
Roberts is a renegade because he is one of the few economists who considers
replacing Americans with cheap labor overseas as a bad idea.

    The Problem of Virtual Immigration, By Paul Craig Roberts, November 28,
2005

    Americans don’t see virtual immigrants as they are working offshore
in their home countries and communicating with their US employers via the
Internet. Americans do not experience virtual immigration until their jobs
are outsourced.

    Moreover, virtual immigrants have massive sources of American support:
corporations that maximize profits by arbitraging labor and the politicians
that they control, libertarians and "free traders" who see freedom and the
invisible hand of the market working through virtual immigration, and "one
world" globalists.

In 2006 Aneesh (that’s his full name, not a typo on my part)
published a book called "Virtual Migration". The picture on his book cover
is worth a thousand words -- it looks like a high-tech sweatshop with
cuddly little cubicles that are manned with virtual migrants. If you like
reading about all things virtual, this book is the one for you! Here is a
sample excerpt:

    The physical ways of performing work are not going to vanish; just as
the theater did not disappear after the cinema turned acting bodies into
moving picture, the embodied migration of labor will perhaps never be
replaced by virtual labor flows, as some services can be performed only
with the body. Virtual and physical migrations are drastically different
species in their mode of global intergration, even if they tend to produce
similar economic effects in terms of jobs and wages. They are as different
as cyberspace is from physical space, despite court cases and metaphors to
the contrary.

    The rules of the road for virtual migration differ from those for
physical migration such as body shopping. etc. etc.

CONCLUSION

I contacted Diane Coyle to inquire if she is the one who invented the term
"virtual immigration". She replied back to me that she cannot be sure she
was the first, but at the time she wrote the 1996 book she wasn’t aware
of the term being used in that context. So, until evidence proves
otherwise, I declare Diane Coyle to be the person who coined the term
"virtual immigration". I’ll leave it to the readers of this overly long
essay to decide whether Coyle’s conception makes her deserving of fame or
infamy.


LINKS:

http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/
Diane Coyle's Website


The Weightless World, Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy, Diane
Coyle, 1996
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/weightlessworld.pdf



Articles and Excerpts:

http://dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2009/el0910.html
Labor Market Globalization in the Recession and Beyond


http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/12/30/virtual-immigration-continued-risi
ng-during-recession/
‘Virtual’ Immigration Continued Rising During Recession


http://arnoldkling.com/undertheradar/opportunities.html
Great Opportunities, No Bull, by Arnold Kling, March 9, 2001


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2009/el0910.html

Economic Letter -- Insights from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Vol. 4, No. 10
December 2009
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Labor Market Globalization in the Recession and Beyond
by W. Michael Cox, Richard Alm and Justyna Dymerska

In recent decades, technology and trade liberalization have propelled
globalization in product and financial markets, leading to substantial
gains in international trade and capital flows. Labor market globalization
has proceeded at a slower pace, largely because restrictive immigration
policies hinder workers’ movement across borders.

Today’s computer and telecommunications technologies have provided a way
to circumvent barriers to labor market globalization’s traditional mode
-- the physical immigration that brings the workers to the work. This
virtual immigration moves the work rather than the workers, and it
typically involves the long-distance delivery of services.

Virtual immigration has unleashed forces that shape globalization in two
important ways: First, it has fueled an offshoring boom that shifts some
services from high-wage countries to low-wage ones. Second, it has allowed
highly paid workers in the U.S. and other wealthy countries to sell
sophisticated services around the world.

Both physical and virtual immigration have contributed to globalization of
the labor force over the past quarter century. This integration has largely
taken place in good times, where unemployment has been low and the number
of jobs has been increasing, particularly in the U.S. Recessions have been
brief and shallow.

In the past two years, however, the economic climate has changed
dramatically. Recession has spread to most parts of the world, slowing or
even reversing globalization’s momentum. Trade has been squeezed.
Financial flows have been contracting. The slowdown has also taken a toll
on both physical and virtual immigration -- a consequence largely related
to market forces rather than inward-looking policies to preserve existing
jobs.

In recovery, the long-term factors supporting cross-border integration of
trade, finance and labor are likely to reemerge, although it may take time
to fully restore globalization’s momentum. The outlook could change if
hard times linger and countries succumb to protectionist temptations,
setting off a destructive process of deglobalization.

Labor Goes Global
The World Bank describes three waves of globalization.[1] The first came
between 1870 and 1914, and the second from 1950 to 1980. The third and
current wave began in 1980, triggered by the entry of many developing
countries into the global marketplace, declining transportation costs and
revolutionary innovations in information technology.

The third wave, like the two globalizations that preceded it, brought a
surge in physical immigration. As the world economy grew in recent decades,
workers moved across borders in search of better jobs -- from Latin America
to the U.S., from Eastern to Western Europe and from South Asia to the
Middle East and elsewhere.

Data on global labor flows are sketchy, but United Nations estimates for
net annual immigration from developing to developed regions show a sharp
third-wave spike from 1.1 million in the early 1980s to 3.2 million in the
first half of this decade. An estimated 100 million people are working
outside their home countries, about 3 percent of the global labor force.[2]

We’re on firmer ground in tracking the U.S. immigrant labor force. The
latest data, covering both legal and illegal workers, show an increase of
68 percent to 24 million in the past 12 years.[3] As a share of the labor
force, the foreign born rose from 10.8 percent in 1996 to 15.6 percent in
2008 (Chart 1).

Chart 1: More Immigrants Seek Work in U.S.
zoom Click to enlarge

Any accounting of physical migration underestimates the impulse toward
labor market globalization. Many more workers might choose to go abroad and
many companies might want to hire them if not for laws that limit legal
immigration and the illegal route’s risks and high costs. In short,
physical immigration has been steadily globalizing the labor market -- but
at a slower pace than the market would dictate.

Given the barriers and costs to physical immigration, it’s not surprising
that a signature feature of globalization’s third wave has been a
technology-driven alternative -- virtual immigration.[4] Work that
doesn’t require local market knowledge or face-to-face contact with
customers is increasingly performed in far-flung locations and "shipped"
back across national borders.

Virtual immigration is an intuitively satisfying concept for the
Information Age, but no country’s labor market reports measure it
explicitly. So how can we track it? Much of virtual immigrants’ work
involves importing or exporting specialized knowledge and information --
just the kind of intangibles that distinguish services from goods in
international trade.

Looking at U.S. services trade, we see a wide swath of economic activity,
only some of it properly classified as virtual immigration. The key is
physical separation between services providers and their customers, a
distance bridged by remote delivery of work across international
boundaries.

An American company may send financial data to New Delhi, where an Indian
bookkeeper cobbles it into a report. An American tourist may fly British
Airways from New York to London. Services trade statistics would capture
both transactions as imports, but only the bookkeeper can be called a
virtual immigrant.

Now consider services exports. A U.S. consulting firm’s Dallas-based
staff may map out a long-term strategic plan for a Taiwanese company. A
surgeon may treat a Mexican patient at a San Antonio hospital. The
consultants are virtual immigrants, not the doctor.

The U.S. tracks imports and exports for about two dozen types of services.
Based on the Commerce Department’s descriptions, nearly a third of the
categories contain low concentrations of virtual immigrants. Three of them
involve travel and transport. Others are hands-on business services -- for
example, equipment installation, maintenance and repair. Low virtual
immigration also characterizes personal services such as medical procedures
and education.[5]

Two-thirds of the Commerce Department’s categories are likely to include
high concentrations of virtual immigrants. They consist largely of
business-to-business services -- computer and information processing,
engineering, accounting, insurance, advertising, finance, legal work,
leasing, management and consulting.[6]

U.S. exports and imports from high virtual immigration services industries
have risen 180 percent since 1998, growing far faster than the low virtual
immigration categories (Chart 2). Since overall services trade rose sharply
in the decade, virtual immigration represents a growing share of an
expanding pie, suggesting a labor market globalization that parallels the
one driven by physical immigration.

Chart 2: Technology Spurs Virtual Immigration
zoom Click to enlarge

Virtual immigration has become increasingly significant in the past decade
as computer and telecommunications advances ratchet up our capacity to move
vast amounts of data around the world cheaply and quickly. Particularly
significant has been the Internet’s reaching critical mass in two key
areas. First, it has spread widely enough to become an indispensable tool
for modern international business. Second, data-transmission capacity has
become big enough to move large amounts of information anywhere in the
world.

For U.S. companies and entrepreneurs, virtual immigration creates
opportunities. Offshoring cuts production costs and enhances global
competitiveness, and U.S. services firms grow and profit by expanding
overseas. For workers, virtual immigration brings competition. U.S.
computer programmers vie with lower-wage rivals in India, while U.S.
lawyers, architects and consultants take on foreign countries’ homegrown
firms.

Developing nations, with an abundance of relatively unskilled labor, focus
on exporting routine services such as computer programming, claims
processing, debt collection and other back-office operations. These
businesses are the mainstays of an offshoring industry in which India ranks
as the global kingpin, employing about 800,000 workers in 2007.[7]

Developed nations, with an abundance of highly skilled workers, gravitate
toward exporting knowledge-intensive and high-value-added services -- the
work of lawyers, accountants, architects, consultants and engineers. The
U.S. has taken advantage of it. As the Internet facilitated a wave of
virtual immigration, we saw the overall surplus in services trade grow from
$78.8 billion in 1998 to $161.4 billion in 2008.

High virtual immigration categories account for eight of the 11 industries
with trade surpluses of better than two to one in 2008 (Chart 3). We
exported $830 for every $100 in imports in operational leasing, a segment
of the industry that handles short-term deals on airplanes, vehicles and
other equipment.[8]

Chart 3: U.S. Holds Widespread Edge in Services Trade
zoom Click to enlarge

Our edge was six to one in distributing movies and television shows and
nearly four to one in architectural, construction and engineering services.
Royalties and licensing fees, one of the largest categories in dollar
terms, came out better than three to one, as did law, finance and
advertising. Mining, education and medicine are among the low virtual
immigration categories with surpluses.

The U.S. imports more than it exports in a few high virtual immigration
categories. The deficits are relatively small in areas related to the
offshoring of back-office functions -- computer and information services
and accounting. Only in insurance did the U.S. run a significant deficit, a
persistent outcome that reflects foreign prowess in the reinsurance end of
the business.

These patterns hold over time. The pecking order may change from year to
year -- for example, the biggest surpluses were for industrial engineering
in 2006 and film and television in 2007 -- but the data consistently show
the U.S. is highly competitive in a wide range of services categories.
Critics complain about U.S. jobs lost as services work goes overseas, but
the trade data show virtual immigration is a two-way street, going out as
services imports and coming in as services exports.

Facing Global Recession
Even in the favorable environment of recent decades, labor market
globalization generated a backlash. U.S. politicians and interest groups,
for example, have been railing against offshoring in particular and
immigrants in general. These sentiments didn’t gain much traction while
the nation needed foreign-born workers to build houses, assemble
manufactured goods, handle back-office work and grow technology industries.

Now, labor market globalization faces a stern test -- a long, severe slump.
As recession deepened and spread, signs pointed to collapsing demand for
immigrant labor. In the U.K., work applications from eight new European
Union member states fell 50 percent in the first three months of 2009.
Japan, Spain and the Czech Republic resorted to programs that paid foreign
workers to go home. United Arab Emirates’ recruiting of new migrants
declined 60 percent.

Take a look at America’s H-1B temporary work visas, awarded principally
to educated foreigners. When the U.S. economy is growing, applications
typically reach their cap minutes after online filing opens.[9] In 2009,
nearly a third of the slots were still available three months into the
process, indicating companies had little immediate need to hire workers
that in previous years had been in short supply.[10]

Mexico tracks the outflow of workers on a timely basis. Recent census
reports show a precipitous drop in emigration -- both legal and illegal --
as the U.S. economy faltered. The decline began in 2006 -- at about the
time the U.S. housing bubble burst, delivering a severe blow to
homebuilding, a big employer of foreign-born workers. It continued in 2007
and 2008 as America’s economy plunged into recession (Chart 4). Mexican
workers have responded to the job market’s deterioration by staying home
and waiting for the U.S. economy to rebound.[11]

Chart 4: Global Recession Reducing Emigration from Mexico
zoom Click to enlarge

The U.S. Current Population Survey indicates recession has shrunk
employment of foreign-born workers. At the start of 2007, with the U.S.
economy in growth mode, 25.6 percent of foreign-born workers had jobs in
two highly cyclical industries -- construction and manufacturing.
Native-born workers’ exposure was 18 percent.

By October 2009, the recession was in its 22nd month, and foreign-born
employment had fallen 35.4 percent from its peak in construction and 16
percent in manufacturing. The financial industry, which provided work for
5.6 percent of immigrants in January 2007, cut foreign-born employment 31.4
percent. The heavy toll in building and finance squares with a housing-led
recession that roiled financial markets. Immigrants faced smaller job
losses in some less-cyclical sectors -- for example, the 5.7 percent
decline in leisure and hospitality.

The data suggest that foreign-born workers were among the first jettisoned
as business activity soured. Employment fell at least two times faster for
immigrants than for natives in mining, financial activities, nonhospital
health care and two categories of professional services (Chart 5). Large
gaps also show up in construction and transportation and utilities.

Chart 5: Job Losses Hit Foreign-Born Workers in U.S.
zoom Click to enlarge

Overall, demand for foreign-born labor declined 8.7 percent from its
prerecession peak, well above the natives’ 5.5 percent rate. In recent
months, the gap in job losses has shrunk, suggesting employers who began by
laying off immigrants have now turned to trimming their payrolls by cutting
native workers.

All told, the anecdotal reports and data suggest physical migration is
highly sensitive to the business cycle in general and labor demand in
particular.

What about virtual immigration? Offshoring data are rarely reliable or up
to date, creating difficulties for measuring the recession’s impact on
sending work to low-wage nations overseas. Hard times might pressure
companies to cut costs, quickening offshoring’s pace. At the same time,
companies might pull back on offshoring because of cuts in IT budgets and
plentiful labor close to home.

India shows these contradictory forces at work. Forecasts call for
continued expansion in the country’s software and IT services exports, a
sign of relatively healthy demand for outsourcing (Chart 6). However, the
projected 17 percent growth rate for these sectors in 2009 is less than
half the pace of the previous four years. Industry reports document deals
being canceled or postponed and clients seeking price cuts of up to 10
percent.[12]

Chart 6: Outsourcing Market in India Continues to Grow
zoom Click to enlarge

U.S. services provide another view on how virtual immigration responds to
recession. Services trade in industries with high concentrations of virtual
immigrants grew an average of 11.3 percent a year from 1998 to 2007. The
growth rate slowed to 7.3 percent in 2008, the first year of the
downturn.[13] In the eight-month recession in 2001, the growth rate of
these high virtual immigration categories retreated to 2.4 percent.

Several sectors actually sped up significantly in the recession year of
2008, led by R&D and testing services, accounting, legal services,
management and consulting, and telecommunications (Chart 7). Finance,
insurance and most other categories still grew last year -- but at a slower
pace. Only two categories showed outright declines -- film and television
rentals and industrial engineering. Data aren’t available to track
services trade in high virtual immigration industries into 2009.

Chart 7: Recession Takes Varied Toll on Virtual Immigration
zoom Click to enlarge

Virtual immigration’s continued growth in recession contrasts with the
evidence of declines in demand for physical immigrants in 2008 and into
2009. Most likely, the difference stems from the jobs the two types of
immigrants typically do. Physical immigrants work in construction and other
highly cyclical industries. Virtual immigrants are more likely to work in
the services economy. It has traditionally been less sensitive than goods
to cyclical fluctuations, largely because services aren’t subject to the
kind of inventory bulges that make goods production unstable.

Recession will pass. At some point, the world economy will begin to grow
again, raising questions about whether the labor market integration we’ve
seen in globalization’s third wave will resume and, if so, at what pace.

The long-term economic forces that have propelled both physical and virtual
immigration should reassert themselves once labor demand rebounds. Large
wage differentials and developing nations’ labor surpluses will once
again spur migration to the richer countries. The same forces will create
incentives for more companies to globalize production and cut costs through
offshoring.

About the Authors

Cox is a senior fellow in the Dallas Fed’s Globalization and Monetary
Policy Institute and director of the William J. O’Neil Center for Global
Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of
Business. Alm is a senior economics writer in the Dallas Fed’s Research
Department. Dymerska, a former consultant in the Research Department, is an
associate with Best Associates in Dallas.

Notes

   1. "The New Wave of Globalization and Its Economic Effects," by Paul
Collier and David Dollar, in Globalization, Growth and Poverty: Building an
Inclusive World Economy, New York: World Bank and Oxford University Press,
2002.
   2. The estimate of 100 million migrants comes from the International
Labor Organization Message by Juan Somavia on International Migrants Day
(Dec. 18, 2008). According to the ILO, about 200 million people are living
outside their home countries, half of them economic migrants. The majority
of the world’s migrants move from one developing country to another
rather than from a developing country to a developed one. This is a
consequence of restrictive immigration policies.
   3. Bureau of Labor Statistics civilian labor force data cover workers 16
years old and above. Immigrant population includes legally admitted
immigrants, refugees, temporary immigrants (students, workers) and
undocumented migrants.
   4. For a more detailed discussion, see Virtual Migration, by Aneesh, Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
   5. Seven categories are low in virtual immigration: educational
services; freight and port services; travel services; passenger fares;
medical services; mining services; and equipment installation, maintenance
and repair services.
   6. Fourteen categories are high in virtual immigration: computer and
information services; accounting, auditing and bookkeeping; insurance;
royalties and licensing fees; R&D and testing; financial services; film and
television show distribution; architecture, engineering and related
services; management and consulting; legal services; advertising;
operational leasing; telecommunications; and industrial engineering. A
catchall for other services couldn’t be characterized as high or low
virtual immigration.
   7. Estimates combine employment in business process outsourcing levels
and knowledge process outsourcing. The former come from "The Indian
Offshoring Story -- Over 170 Years in the Making," by Amit Paul Babu and
Ullas Marar, Sept. 18, 2008. The latter come from "India’s Knowledge
Process Outsourcing (KPO) Sector: Origin, Current State and Future
Directions," by Evalueserve, July 5, 2007.
   8. For more on globalization and services, see "Opportunity Knocks: