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Work visas are not limited to IT only, but speaking of IT, consider larger implications of offshoring/inshoring/re-shoring: the "cloud" and SaaS/PaaS make a lot of these issues even more difficult for in-house personnel:

A significant number of CIOs and IT directors believe that the phrase "IT department" will eventually cease to exist, according to a recent survey from Logicalis. There's no need to panic, however, because there will always be a huge demand — in fact, there will be a rapidly increasing demand — for tech professionals, especially those who combine IT skills with business-focused savvy. The accompanying survey report, "Establishing the Internal Service Provider: A Global Study of CIO Pressures and Priorities," depicts a dramatically evolving landscape in which technology leaders, managers and staff are getting more involved with ROI-impacting initiatives, while business units are making their own decisions about technology acquisitions. In the past, organizational leadership often took issue with internal users who circumvented IT to get the tech they wanted: a practice referred to as "shadow IT." Now, however, shadow IT is increasingly perceived as a logical means to an end in terms of addressing unfulfilled needs to support objectives. "It is clear that businesses don't want a technology solution," says Mike Martin, senior vice president of solutions and services for Logicalis US. "They want their business needs to be met. That means the CIO's role must change from that of a technology provider to one that is laser-focused on delivering IT services that meet line-of-business users' needs." More than 177 global CIOs and IT directors took part in the research.

Dennis McCafferty is a freelance writer for Baseline Magazine. (Baseline, 2014-12-19)

Fantasy.

I agree that software virtualization will continue to be a trend.

However, at some point, you run out of available CPU cycles. Then there’s the inexplicable demise of some large company’s entire infrastructure, and its backups.

Then there is the internet, which will explode a little more when private versions of the internet start to manifest themselves. Users will only be allowed biometrically.

Even the clouds will come home. I remember when it was cheap to make stuff in Japan. China is not all that happy about having grown a middle class.

You think people will offshore to Africa? Not bloody likely.

The problem with shadow IT and with service-based IT models is the lack of enterprise cohesion. You usually have a CISO or risk manager who needs all IT systems to have antivirus. Then you need IDS/IPS in front of your firewalls. Then you need to have a comprehensive patching process. Then you need to have consolidated hosting. In the end, it brings everything back to an in-house team needing to keep the ship running.

I am all too familiar with this way of working. I spend a lot of time writing documentation for our offshore resources, only to have to be the bad guy at least once a week, because one of them, usually a “new hire,” did something outside of the established practices that either caused or exacerbated an outage. As time goes on, the number of IT professionals needed in house will go down, but their skill sets will need to be vast and deep. Patience is key, and I know most IT engineers often lack that quality.