"In other words, the net effect on the U.S. labor pool was zero."
I remember the thread and the example. This is a small company and an extremely small part of the outsourcing picture.
Consider the large corporations that are outsourcing entire departments. These corporations were very profitable here in the U.S. while their entire workforce was Americans; they just want to increase their profits. The new increase in profits is not being passed on to the consumer or even the stockholder.
The business execs claim they outsource to compete, just like they said there was a shortage of programmers and they needed more H1B and L1 visa workers as recently as last year. They are simply greedy liars. And, by lobbying certain congressmen they have a nice racket going on. The Christian Conservative Phyllis Schlafly has written 3 articles on the subject; she calls it a racket and a scam.
On a related thread regarding illegal workers from Mexico, 3 Republican U.S. Senators have just sponsered a bill to allow illegals here to work. Mexican President Vicente Fox is very pleased with the bill. So are the businessmen who will continue to hire Mexican illegals (only now they will be legal to work here), rather than Americans.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/954159/posts What we have is a governing body that is ignoring their Constitutional duties. Congress was given the power to regulate commerce and we are supposedly endowed with certain unalienable rights.
Hypothetical test for everyone . . . Ask yourself how much you would charge for your services if you were in the business of mowing lawns. Then ask yourself how much you would pay someone else to mow your own lawn. Then do the same for any number of other tasks that are done largely by immigrants these days.
In any given case, the difference between the two numbers (and this figure is usually very large) represents your "credibility gap" when it comes to complaining about the impact of immigrant labor.