Economist magazine’s essay contest: “Import workers or export jobs?” George gives it a nice try, but takes no prize.

I thus labor under a productivity incentive not present when billing a standard lawyer’s hourly fee. The client benefits further because I am a small-market, small-firm lawyer, and even on an hourly basis bill less than newly minted associates at major-market megafirms — despite having over twenty years of experience. My “law library” physically resides on servers upriver in the Twin Cities, but is Internet-accessible worldwide. My “product” will be emailed to Los Angeles moments after completion.

This year my employment law blog has received hits from 85 foreign countries, providing unprecedented free exposure and networking potential for me and my thoughts. I’m no longer bound by geographical restrictions and limitations on whom I know. I’m an international knowledge worker, with all the benefits, opportunities, and vulnerabilities such status entails, including a vastly improved ability to obtain new work, as well as exposure to a risk of possible exporting of my work.

Over the past year, American anxiety over exporting jobs has shifted quite suddenly from blue collars to white collars, temporarily eclipsing worries about importing workers (immigration). We hear of “outsourcing,” “offshoring,” and “Benedict Arnold employers.” Whatever the nature of the jobs, and whether the issue of the day is trade or immigration, the refrain is always the same: “They’re taking our jobs.”

These worries resonate politically this election year; they always have and perhaps always will. But we should heed FDR’s words about economic insecurity, spoken in 1933 amidst the Great Depression: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Protectionism and harsh immigration policies inspired by fear are far more harmful than the global trade and human migration that fuel such fear. We claim to believe in freedom; this must encompass the freedom to buy and sell services at freely negotiated prices, and the freedom to migrate in search of opportunity.

The Internet facilitates the outsourcing of white-collar work, but we must not permit our anxiety surrounding this fact to overshadow the innumerable benefits of this world-altering technology. The newfound mobility of much intellectual work is personally liberating. Commuting and business travel burdens and expenses are mitigated. We can perform work for domestic and foreign businesses alike from the comfort of our chosen location — a wireless-enabled beachside café, if you please. We can rapidly assemble short-term task-based teams from around the world. We have unprecedented global opportunities to network and promote our businesses, talents, and ideas via the Internet.

Picture a global Ebay-style market for services (see Elance Online to glimpse this future today). Pessimists see such a market as relentlessly forcing a downward spiral of personal income, with jobs going to the lowest-bidding workers. In contrast, I see millions of win-win deals as the functionality and efficiency of the Invisible Hand is multiplied. Knowledge workers are sellers of services who benefit from access via cyberspace to a world of buyers and a competitive global market. Does Ebay benefit only buyers, and harm sellers, whose prices are inevitably undercut? Of course not. Millions of smart users — both buyers and sellers — participate in this huge cyberauction marketplace every day, to engage in mutually beneficial transactions. The global market for intellectual services will function likewise.

American businesses are branded as traitors for outsourcing services, yet this practice benefits us all. It is not only “the rich” who gain as stockholders when corporate profitability is enhanced; we are now a nation of 401(k) stockholders who share in such profits.

Significantly, service outsourcing may also help stem runaway costs in several troublesome sectors of our economy. Healthcare and secondary education costs have long outpaced inflation, and government budgets must be trimmed. Taking healthcare as an example, major savings could be achieved through exporting back-office functions such as transcription, billing, and medical records, and even some skilled medical functions that can be performed via the Internet, such as review of digital diagnostic images. Similar savings from outsourcing can ease the budgets of educational institutions and government agencies, yet the very mention of state government outsourcing leads to emotional calls for job-preservation legislation.

Should we stubbornly resist outsourcing in these sectors and forfeit billions of dollars in savings in order to save thousands of American jobs? How many more jobs would be forfeited due to runaway health care costs and high taxes rendering American businesses less competitive? How many more unemployed workers would be unable to afford needed education and training? Clumsy government efforts to interfere with the market forces driving outsourcing, however popular politically, will be much more costly than swallowing our fears and facing the future with confidence and hope in the benefits of change.

We must step outside our selfish America-first perspective and view these benefits of change as the world citizens that we are. Trade, migration, and economic interdependence make the world safer and more prosperous for all. It was the economic ties of the Common Market that finally brought peace and stability to war-torn Europe. Will there not be a similar peace dividend for all in America’s economic ties with China and India, potentially dangerous nuclear powers? Is not economic growth in the rest of the world, where most humans live in unimaginable poverty, a worthy goal in itself? Will not such growth present vast new opportunities for American businesses?

This is not a zero-sum game. We will all gain. Some lesser-known statements from the 1933 FDR Inaugural speech quoted above are remarkably apt today: “Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. . . . [O]ur true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. . . .[W]e now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well. . . .” Let us not begrudge our trading partners’ successes, but instead derive satisfaction from our role in improving the lives of their citizens.

I break from my legal work for errands and carry-out. At the corner pharmacy’s counter, I encounter a cheerful young lady with an accent whose smock bears a sign in Russian lettering below her nametag. “Does that say ‘I speak Russian’?” I inquire. “Yes, how did you know?” (Lucky guess.) She has quite a few Russian customers, she says with pride. On my way out, I hear a Slavic accent over the intercom.

I drive through a formerly rundown stretch of small commercial buildings and strip malls that has blossomed into a full-blown Chinatown, where I can choose from about twenty Asian restaurants and grocery stores. Before picking up dinner, I stop for a haircut. I receive superior, unhurried personal attention from a Hong Kong émigré who plays drums in a rock band, watches ESPN day and night, and eagerly asks if I know where the nearest Ponderosa restaurant is.

A few miles away, members of one of the largest Bosnian refugee communities in the U.S. rebuild a tired old city neighborhood, making Muslim headscarfs a common sight and generating neighborly curiosity by transforming their brick garages into smokehouses for processing goat meat.

Out in the wealthier suburbs, teams of Mexicans landscape office parks in the blazing summer heat. Here in America’s midsection, “imported workers” are omnipresent; the American melting pot swirling and bubbling with promise.

Import workers? We’ve always done it. Employers report that even in this supposedly “jobless recovery” they have many jobs most Americans are unwilling to take. Anticipated demographic trends will likely increase the workforce imbalance for such jobs, tending to raise wages. We have been largely unable to stem illegal immigration. It will be harder yet to limit cyber-commerce involving outsourcing of white-collar work. How do you enforce a ban or tariff on digitally importing outsourced intellectual property over the Internet? We have much less control over these matters than we’d like to think. With immigration as with outsourcing, the cost-benefit analysis suggests that even if we had more control a policy favoring freedom and mobility would be preferable.

My Hungarian Jewish grandfather and his family became refugees twice, narrowly escaping fate in the Holocaust only to see the Iron Curtain fall over their homeland. With a modest downpayment on an Indiana farm, and a two-page business plan, they were able to obtain an agricultural visa. I owe my life to this immigration policy loophole. As my grandparents labored on the farm, the next generation pursued graduate degrees, leaping from refugee farmers to college professors, scientists, and engineers in one generation.

This American Dream is real and vital. American freedom will continue to draw many of the most ambitious, intelligent, creative, and hardworking folks from around the world — if we’ll have them. Immigration is as positive and necessary to American progress today as ever before. Here again, we must not be conquered by our fears. On the other hand, we must not fall prey to the excesses of “multiculturalism.” Assimilation of immigrants into a common American culture and prompt adoption of the English language are essential to national unity. Let’s drop the hyphens and mushrooming numbers of race/national origin census categories and insist that we are all just Americans.

My wish for the future is that immigrants will continue to enrich the American experience and make better lives for themselves and their children here, and new generations of global American entrepreneurs will continue to create the intellectual and financial capital to provide opportunities for all both here and abroad.

As mobility and freedom spread, we will also import jobs and export workers. Prosperity abroad will yield high demand for those services that can be performed here on behalf of foreign businesses and governments, and for those that can be performed abroad by new generations of skilled American expatriates.

Finally, mobility within our borders remains vital. Locked within inhospitable inner-city neighborhoods and dying small towns is a massive pool of wasted human resources, geographically mismatched with the labor demand in sprawling suburbia. Here too there are untapped opportunities to import workers to job locations, and export jobs to take advantage of available labor where it is located.

“Import workers or export jobs?” Let’s answer this question the right way, the fair way, the American way — “Yes” and “Yes”!

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