They do actually, for example Microsoft has substantial R&D operations in India and China among others. But they also use H1Bs. Most big companies do both, but unlike the body shops, aren’t going to be affected by this very much.

> Wonder why they don't already take advantage of all this "cheap and good labor" out there, as you put it?

what makes you think they aren't? I work for Red Hat. It is an amazing company to work for. But our main technology center is in the Czech Republic, where the cost of living is 40% lower than the US. Those are absolutely great engineers to work with, and despite some of the alarming comments here they are absolutely as high quality as any US engineer if not more so. But the fact remains that their salaries are spent overseas and not here in the US.

This is why the point of free trade is to raise the standard of living in those nations so that not only does life get better for everyone around the world, but also other nations no longer act as a cheap drain for jobs that pay artificially higher wages domestically. It's a huge idea that has worked in many ways, raising US GDP vastly beyond what it could be under heavy protectionism (think: the whole world as your customer base as well as your production base vs. just the US). But it also failed spectacularly in that it isolated low skilled workers in the US who became even more resentful of foreigners than they already were, who then went ahead and elected a facist government. Whoops.

Its a matter of scale, not anecdotal stories. Saying “my company does it and is successful” and “big companies don’t do it at scale” are equally right and factual. If there was a suppky of cheap talent outside the US the big companies are already utilizing it. There are benificial network effects to moving some of them to the US.

I was responding to a poster who claimed it was not happening at all. Also I think it's a great idea to build tech centers all over the world, to raise the standard of living in many places and to further the practice of working with a mix of disparately located and remote workers.