The movement against H-1B visas is intimately tied to the anger at outsourcing. Anti-outsourcing activists see an insidious progression: Come to America to work for U.S. companies, get trained by U.S. workers, and then take away American jobs after going home.

The number of H-1B visas that allow temporary guest workers to come to the United States is fixed by Congress, a political football that can be fought over domestically. But it's harder to see how the U.S. government could regulate the "offshoring" of jobs, even if it saw fit to try.

"The practical question of enforcing this is mind-bogglingly difficult," says Griswold. "It's one thing to try to monitor slabs of steel coming into U.S. ports. It's quite another thing to try to monitor and control bits of information bouncing off satellites and flying through cables at the speed of light. It opens up questions of privacy and how powerful we want government to be."

But other economists say that while offshoring may be good for a company's bottom line, it may ultimately not be good for that same company's market. "It makes perfect sense for the individual company, and it makes no sense for the U.S. economy," says Alan Tonelson, author of "The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards."

An individual company may cut costs and increase profits by sending jobs overseas, says Tonelson, but in the long run that will erode the huge market that they depend on most -- the buying power of U.S. consumers. "If all of this outsourcing to India and China and Russia, if it was mainly serving those economies, it would be different, but much of this outsourcing is serving the U.S. market."

In other words, in the effort to make goods and services more cheaply, American companies may be undermining their own long-term interests. "American industry has been firing its best customers, which are its own workers," says Tonelson. "It's as if these companies expect the American consumer to keep on consuming."

But discussions about tech jobs moving overseas tend to ignore how many new jobs are created by the growing demand of foreign markets, other economists say.

"So far, the rise in globalization has been pretty darn nice for people who are in the top end of the technology and tech skills spectrum," says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institute. "It's worked out pretty darn well. Whatever they might say, folks in those occupations have enjoyed faster income gains, even taking into account the last two bad years, than people in most occupations in the U.S. I believe that the United States is still a very, very big net exporter of computer services. That means that on balance a lot more people in this industry who work here in the U.S. owe their living to the fact that the U.S. is selling in a huge world market."

If the U.S. government starts trying to set restrictions on the ability of U.S. companies to export work to other countries, Burtless says, those countries may stop buying products from those same American companies. "Microsoft is worth a tremendous amount more because it is selling in a global market," Burtless says. "But if the U.S. tries to create a new set of rules, there is no earthly reason [other countries] have to buy Microsoft. They can buy Linux."

There are things that workers can do to save their jobs, says WashTech's Courtney, such as fighting federal research and development subsidies to companies that are sending jobs overseas. Why shouldn't workers demand the same protections that software companies do for their intellectual property rights? asks Courtney.

"The high-tech industry today is pushing our elected officials and leaders to go over to China and India and demand protection for their intellectual property rights," Courtney says. "Why aren't they over here demanding the protection of our economic interests?"

In a depressed economy, worker anxiety naturally rises. But the Economic Policy Institute's Bivens thinks that the whole outsourcing threat is overblown: "I think that there's a real bias toward exaggerating the outsourcing we're doing. You always hear that India is taking away a lot of these jobs. It's still really, really tiny in the latest data, which is two years old."

Bivens concedes that "maybe it's exploded in the last two years," but he points out that the technology industry has an incentive to keep the offshoring option in the public eye as it engages in a continuous political battle to maintain the number of H-1B visas it can extend to foreign workers. The threat is potent: "Fine. If we can't get the visas, we'll just send the jobs over there!"

Certainly EDS, Hewlett-Packard and other companies selling offshoring services to high-tech companies have a vested interest in pumping up the appearance of a trend. In fact, a competing research firm, Gartner Group, challenged the study by A.T. Kearney (EDS's consulting group), which predicted 500,000 financial services jobs would go overseas in the next five years. In a report entitled "White-collar Job Loss Due to Offshore Outsourcing Inflated," Gartner acknowledged that "among IT jobs in the more-developed countries, the offshore migration is already occurring." But "immediate concern, however, is unwarranted over the loss of non-IT professional or white-collar jobs," the report said.

Bivens also argues that your average corporate executives have to pay lip service to the outsourcing trend to sound like they're on the cutting-edge -- and keep their jobs: "To a chief information officer, outsourcing is a sign of creative cost-cutting. They're never going to say, No, we're not considering it." Studies that rely on asking executives about future plans could therefore produce inflated numbers, he says.

But after reading yet another article about the cost savings of outsourcing and offshoring, who can blame unemployed or underemployed tech workers for believing that their jobs have been farmed out to some faceless worker in China who will work for half the money?

Bivens thinks that in most cases that fear is simply a convenient myth: "The No. 1 thing that is hurting information technology professionals is the recession and the popping of the tech-market bubble. Outsourcing, [even] if it's second, would be way distant."

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