(cache) Trump Can't Stop the Globalization of Work—the Internet Will See to That

Donald Trump is promising to make America great again by keeping others out. That approach is already undermining the smidgen of tentative good will he had enjoyed from the tech industry. As a strategy for keeping jobs in the US, it’s also fatally flawed. Turns out that in a world connected by the internet, isolationism is just a glitch in the network that the system—in this case, the global economy—routes around.

In the days since Trump signed his executive order limiting immigration from certain countries, tech employees who work in the US but were stuck outside the country have stayed in touch via email, videoconferencing, social media, and chat programs like Slack. In 2017, most of the day-to-day work that high-tech employees do takes place entirely on computers. Whether that computer is on Google’s campus in Mountain View or an airport in Tehran is largely irrelevant.

“Remote work is clearly ready to take up the practical slack from Trump’s bans and walls when it comes to creative, intellectual work that can be done in front of a computer,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, co-creator of Ruby on Rails and an impassioned proponent of remote work. “That doesn’t make the restrictions any less wrong, but at least the internet provides a way to literally route around the damage.”

Tech-enabled flexibility tamps down the disruptive potential of unexpected upheaval. It will also undermine any effort to make employing highly skilled foreign workers harder for tech companies, as Trump and Congress are both considering. Such restrictions will likely result in more employees working remotely, and more high-paying software jobs moving permanently offshore. Ultimately, entire companies may decide to relocate outside the US to countries more committed to the kind of openness so highly prized in the tech industry.

“The unintended consequence of the proposed executive order and even the current one will be more US jobs being done overseas,” says Catharine Fisk, an international labor expert at the University of California, Irvine.

Making Magic Anywhere

Coding jobs are a prime target for outsourcing. It’s already common practice at firms both large and small. (Remember in Silicon Valley when Dinesh has a crush on the coder from Estonia?) But in recent years, the practice has been on the decline in the US. That’s a trend a crackdown in immigration could reverse.

At the moment, tech companies take pains to keep workers in the same room together owing to the fashionable idea that physical proximity breeds creativity. Call it the Bell Labs ideal. “(Big tech firms) have spent more than a decade fighting for the outdated theory that people need to sit face-to-face in an overpriced Bay Area office to make ‘magic,'” Hansson says. But even if companies can’t be talked out of their physical fixation, they don’t need to make that magic in America. Maybe companies would rather keep teams physically intact than outsource some work. So what’s to stop them from outsourcing the entire company? “If they can’t bring the skilled workers to the US, presumably they could also just offshore the managers and designers and just move the entire production overseas,” Fisk says.

‘The internet provides a way to literally route around the damage.’

In some cases, that’s already happening. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Cisco have already opened hubs in Canada in order to avoid the confusing and restrictive immigration process in the US, the Wall Street Journal reports. In their amicus brief filed to the Ninth District Court of Appeals on Monday, a coalition of 97 tech companies warned that more such relocations could be coming. The Trump administration could fight back by imposing higher taxes on tech companies that outsource jobs or move tech hubs overseas—though how that would jibe with its stated goal of removing 75 percent of government regulations is unclear.

A reluctance to embrace remote work could also catch some companies ill-prepared for possible new restrictions. Smaller firms and freelancers are able to be more nimble. “We are strongly against what is happening,” says Jake Frey, founder of the design firm Labs, who helped two UX designers stuck because of the ban find remote gigs while they waited to return to their lives in the US. “Two may not sound like a lot but in my opinion, two is already too many,” he adds. Bigger outfits may find they have a harder time adjusting as quickly, especially if the Trump administration keeps up the practice of dropping major policy changes with little preparation or consideration of the consequences. “Many of the larger tech companies, especially those from Silicon Valley, are ill-equipped ideologically to take advantage of this damage routing,” Hansson says.

Large or small, however, the tech industry epitomizes the 21st century economy’s global sensibility. Success depends on skill, which gives companies an overwhelming incentive to seek out talent whatever the nationality. In a world connected by the internet, capitalism will find a way.