Open Borders and Remote Work

A guest post by Vipul Naik

Vipul Naik is a long-time friend and a great intellectual entrepreneur. He was the main architect of the Open Borders website, and a major inspiration for my immigration blogging. Recently, Vipul wrote this piece on the immigration implications of remote work. Reprinted with his permission. Enjoy!

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For the past few years I’ve been mulling how the rise in remote work (particularly in the knowledge work space) affects the importance of freedom of movement for work. I’ve been deferring writing up my thoughts because I thought this is a somewhat esoteric topic, but it has come up in the news in several ways recently.

(a) The recent enhanced social media screening implemented for US visa approvals has ended up causing huge backlogs in visa processing for Indians, and a number of Indians who have jobs in the US on H-1B or similar status, and were traveling to India, hoping to get a visa to return to their jobs, have found themselves stranded in India for what might be several months or even a year (see e.g., https://news.bloomberglaw.com/.../h-1b-workers-stranded...).

(b) The new $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions in the US for people from outside the US has led to companies exploring offshoring jobs more aggressively.

(c) I’ve read reports of Nick Shirley-inspired “journalists” going around to H-1B worksites in Texas trying to uncover fraud by showing that people aren’t coming to the office, with the argument that if they’re remote anyway, why do they need a H-1B? Why can’t they work from their home country? See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/.../art.../127150617.cms for instance (I can’t find the citation for where I read the “if they’re remote anyway” part of the argument, but it was another article on the topic or the comments section of that article).

This has made the rather esoteric topic somewhat relevant to modern discourse, so I decided to go ahead and pen my thoughts.

Before going further, I will say that I’m incredibly grateful for all the developments in computing, telecommunications, and collaboration software that have enabled the rise of partly-or-wholly remote work. I’m also appreciative of the many efforts humans have put in to adjust to this new way of remote working and uncover forms of collaboration that would have been much harder otherwise. At the margin, I think this does somewhat reduce the need for people to migrate to do jobs, and I think that’s a good thing!

However, I also think that it’s easy to overstate the extent to which remote work obviates the need for people to move. Below, I describe some of the reasons.

(1) Many jobs are intrinsically physical and can’t be done remotely at all! Even a lot of “knowledge work” jobs cannot be made fully remote because there’s some part of the job that requires physical presence. Many biotechnology and biomedical research jobs are like this -- while much of the work might be doable electronically, there’s still some amount of work that has to be done in the lab. And for reasons of economies of scale, not everybody can make a lab in their own home; there have to be central locations to do this work. And if somebody has to be in the office even a couple of days a week, that makes it much harder to live very far from work (a few people do stay an hour or two away from work by flight, but it’s not a lifestyle most people can handle).

(2) Even for jobs that are in principle fully remote, many employers have chosen to require employees to come to the office at least a few days a week, or in some cases, for a week every few weeks. The wisdom of this decision can be questioned, but at least so far, it does look like that’s where things are. While some of these arrangements make it possible for people to live somewhat far from work and then travel and stay in a hotel for the few days of collaboration, this is still difficult if you’re living very far from work or in a different time zone.

(3) Even many fully remote jobs are not asynchronous! There’s often a concept (at least approximate) of a few hours in the day where most work and collaboration happens. People who are in time zones very far removed from these hours have challenges working.

This argument makes the case for significant remote work across latitudes but in similar time zones; for instance, across the Americas, across Europe, or across East Asia. But collaboration across widely different time zones, such as America and East Asia, is still a challenge.

In my experience, in the face of these challenges, people follow one of two strategies: (a) keep some small overlap (1 or 2 hours) and accept the efficiency losses from the lack of overlap at other times, or (b) operate as night-shift workers, accepting the health impact and efficiency losses coming from the productivity effects of those health impacts. For many jobs and many workers, (a) and (b) are reasonable compromises, but for others that involve being in top cognitive and physical form while engaging in rapid back-and-forth collaboration, they may not be!

(4) There are several other legal and regulatory complications associated with hiring people across jurisdictions, including different labor laws in different jurisdictions, the need to set up subsidiaries or work through intermediaries, data privacy laws that might prevent certain data from leaving jurisdictional boundaries (particularly the case in Europe, but also an issue in many other areas as privacy-focused legislation takes root), restrictions on the use of various tools at work (for instance, many products require one to use an IP address from a particular country or have a phone number in a particular country), and probably many other minor irritants. In most cases, these can be worked around, but the workarounds add up over time. And where the cost/benefit analysis nets out can depend a lot on just how important it is to move fast and collaborate effectively.

(5) At least for some jobs that are in principle fully remote, productivity and quality of work at the job are improved by better knowledge of the language(s), culture, and physical and administrative structure of the target markets. A lot of these can be learned deliberately while remote, but are learned more effectively when living in the area, because gathering that information becomes functionally useful for navigating life even outside of work. For instance, if you’re working on building mapping solutions targeted at India, it helps to have a better sense of what it’s like to navigate in India and the challenges with interpreting addresses and directions in India. And it’s hard to get a good appreciation of this if you’ve only lived in an urban area of the United States, where street address conventions are much more streamlined. If you’re working on a social network service based in Korea, it helps to understand the dynamics of social networking in Korea, which are in many ways different than the United States or India. And living in the area, following the news, and seeing how stories develop and spread through social media can give one a better sense of this.

Interestingly, the language(s) piece is one that favors remote work for businesses in English-speaking countries, given the widespread diffusion of English around the world. On the other hand, for a business based in Europe or East Asia, primarily targeting local markets in local languages, having employees be more familiar with the local language is important, even if the business uses English as the official language of communication to facilitate remote work.

Conclusion and further thoughts: Outside of the economic (work) angle, telecommunication has also brought the world closer in areas outside of work, but here, the closing of the gap seems less impressive than with work. This might be because leisure and relationships are still more heavily dependent on in-person interaction or experiences. Eating at a restaurant, for instance, is not something that can be done across huge distances. While virtual reality / augmented reality might help address some of these use cases, it’s still early days to say how far that’ll go. For now, I’d say that remote work has chipped only a tiny little bit into the economic portion of the case for freedom of movement, and not at all into the other angles of the case.