Commentary: Outsourcing Jobs: Is It Bad?

These are anxious times for U.S. workers. Sure, the recovery seems to be getting under way. Yet hardly a week goes by without another report of a batch of high-paying, white-collar jobs getting exported to far cheaper locales such as India, China, or the Philippines. In mid-July, IBM (IBM ) set off a firestorm when news of its plans to move more white-collar jobs overseas was leaked to The New York Times. And news service Reuters announced on July 28 that it will move 600 or so jobs from New York, as well as dozens of other slots in England, Scotland, and Singapore, to its operations in India.

As white-collar jobs move away with increasing regularity, a debate that once focused on the loss of manufacturing to foreign outsourcing is once again raging: Just how serious for America, its workforce, and its economy is the shift? Two decades ago, the loss of auto jobs and other high-paying manufacturing jobs sparked fears of a hollowing-out of the U.S. economy. Yet painful as the loss of those positions were, strong economic growth and innovation created far more -- and better -- jobs to replace them.