The article compared apples to apples; they did NOT compare "women's studies" grads to IT jobs. It was IT to IT.
The sole reason they're doing this is the money. About 15 years ago, CBS News followed the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor around as he tried to implement a mandate of his board to cut labor costs. This was a board directive; previously he had tried to follow it using American workers but the board redirected him to offshore some of his operations. The board was very "not shy" about telling him what they wanted, and that was an Asian operation.
CBS documented this guy's going to Filipino government salesmen (essentially that's what they were) flacking for a new industrial zone being greenfielded in the general Manila Bay-Subic Bay area. The Flip government offered the CEO a young woman pink-collar employee who knew Microsoft Office (she went through the routine, for his benefit, of creating a new doc and saving it, opening and using Access, etc.), and they said she would get, on local prevailing wages, about $4.85/DAY; and they also quoted $8500/yr for software engineers. On top of that, they offered Cypress a tax-incentive package to move some or all of their operation to this Luzon "special tax zone".
So Cypress's board was playing pitch, and the Filipinos were playing catch.
The sole purpose of the whole exercise was to eliminate American wages previously negotiated or merited. It was a giant welsh, ordered by the board for the money's sake.
So it was not a question of Americans' being "on their dead asses", contrary you n/w/s.
When corporations want to hire in from the slums of Campbellpore and Kowloon and sell on Rodeo Drive, American workers don't stand much chance of keeping their jobs.
Furthermore:
Indians in upper management have made statements to the effect that "IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] graduates are much better hires than MIT men; I'd rather have an IIT guy who can hit the ground running; they're much more job-oriented and better-grounded than MIT guys."
I am assured on no weak authority that this is a b.s. line used solely to justify Indian managers' continuing to hire fellow-Indian immigrants, either directly or on wage-slavery contracts from Tata International, over qualified American help which is usually better suited in terms of relevant experience, schooling, and quals.
Lastly, those Americans required to teach Indians probably didn't do so. The one case a friend of mine knew about involved some code writers who had both to compete with and train Indian H-1B hires who would supplant them. No way did the Americans show the Indians all the shortcuts the Americans used to make code run faster; no way did they unbundle the hard-won experience of a lifetime for these mooks. The result was that the Indians' code ran, all right, but it was infuriatingly slow, clunky, and buggy. Top management got what top management wanted to pay for.
So there it is. Weep, weep, occupied ga, for the philistines who once were savaged by Dickens, who merely showed us what those men were like in his novels, and who are now among us again by the operation of Wall Street sophistries about "delivering to the bottom line" and "unlocking the value".
My rant was about the general quality of job applicants for technical positions and the paucity of well qualified Americans to fill them based on my hiring experiences in the last year. I'm not saying that offshore operations are happening more and more. They are, but I had a hard time finding people that could do the job and didn't speak with an accent.