Be careful what you wish for. This is something that Canada and the EU might want to return in kind, because the massive untaxed trade imbalance between us and the US regarding digital goods and services has been a thorn in our governments' side for a good while now.

One time back in the '10s I called Apple for something at about 5PM Austin time. It got answered by someone in Ireland. My mind was blown, both because I think Apple had recently opened a call center in Austin, and because that meant it was almost midnight at the call center.

Anyhow, it's about time they figured out a way to "tariff" off-shored non-manufacturing jobs.

It really is kind of insane for a service based economy to outsource services and labor as a first resort.

Some of his policies orient around tariffs to keep jobs here. The only people who support free trade with low income countries are people who want to make a buck off of the significant wage gap, that and people who can't see past "Trump is bad", and think for themselves. Yeah, we pay a little more, but as demand for labor increases we also get paid more as well. This stuff doesn't happen overnight, but we're also seeing countries build in the US now. And we're seeing that you need to hire American or legall

Be very careful what you wish for. It might look good on the surface, but I think would absolutely destroy American companies' ability to compete internationally unless it is very narrowly defined (and if it is narrowly defined, it won't have much of an impact).

What exactly counts as "offshoring"? All global companies set up subsidiaries abroad which are technically separate companies in just about every country they operate in and basically have contracts with the parent company. Do all these get taxed? Co

I've dealt with call center agents from the USA, China, India, down to local ones. And all of the agents that take the call pretty much only run a script to cover the most common cases. But all of them can and will kick the call up to people who can actually help. The one thing I hate (and call centers from all parts of the world still do this) is when they make you walk through all the pointless troubleshooting steps in the script before they escalate your call.

As crap as AI is shaping up to be, it still seems to be not much worse than a call center in India. This adds a second front in that war.

I'm not defending India, but their workforce does speak English, just with a heavy accent. Still, it's more comprehensible than the Scottish accent.

Some of the at is cultural, some is education but a lot of it just selection bias I expect.

Most companies are going to outsource their first and second lines of support not the stuff that requires technical ability and deep knowledge about systems or decision making authority to resolve. Not that you can't or that some don't but the simple-er basic customer service tasks are obviously the easiest thing to throw over the wall to some third party.

My point is frustrating as it is, I don't think agents are to b

Instead, you will just get substandard IT services from genuine US employees :)

The support that is bad now will not get better when it goes to the US. Some support is good because the ones paying for it want it it be good, not because of from where it is provided.