Daniel Drezner has a nice look at the new BLS figures on offshoring. Turns out that something like 2 % of jobs lost were in fact due to offshore outsourcing. So not a large problem then, some 5,000 workers or so as opposed to the benefits felt by the other 290 million Americans via cheaper products and services.
There is, I think, a further distinction that can be usefully made. This is between a US company that hires an offshore firm to do work for it and one that sets up its own subsidiary offshore to do it. In the first case, as it is current expenditure, there is no influence on the capital account. In the second place it will be recorded as US investment overseas. From this we might want to have a look at a further set of numbers: US investment overseas and overseas investment in the US.
We won’t get a complete picture for the above reason that we will miss those hiring other companies rather than making their own foreign direct investment (FDI) but we might get a sketch of an answer to whether the US worker benefits from international investment or not. Well, I can’t be bothered to go and look up the exact figures, they’re there on the BEA site somewhere so I’ll run on memory here. Some $ 8 trillion of foreign investment in the US and some $ 5 trillion of US investment overseas. (Note, this is also an incomplete figure as it includes such things as Treasury bonds etc, not just FDI.) So it would appear that the US gains here, that there is more capital coming into the country to hire US workers than there is flowing out of the country depriving US wrokers of jobs. Hhhhm. So the net job position enjoyed by the US as a result of international offshoring is positive?
But that’s a stock. Which way are the numbers moving? The US is running a deficit on the trade account. That means it must (it’s an accounting identity) be running a surplus on the capital account. So each year more capital is being invested in the US than is flowing out of it. So the effect is being magnified.
Yes, there are holes in this chain of logic, mostly to do with me being too lazy to look up the figures for FDI rather than general capital flows. It does lead to an intruiging thought though. That the BLS should show net not gross figures for the effects of international investment. I have a feeling that they would be positive in the effects on the US employment rate. Which would neatly take the wind out of the sails of a number of commentators.

Update. I did go and look at the BEA numbers and FDI is flowing away from the US, while total capital flows are still inwards as they must be. At this point I run out of steam and need to have a professional economist explain this to me. The BEA figures I give for the stock are slightly sneaky, as they rely upon current values, not historical, so a rise in the value of US assets generally would move the figure without doing much for US job counts. I’m not really sure what the influence of foreign investemnt in Treasuries is on US jobs either. I can imagine that at first, nothing, but second order effects of lowering interest rates might be quite large. Still end up with the same conclusion, that the BLS should also be publishing net figures. Also, not only.