Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
What about Central America?
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.
The post-Covid offshoring is looking quite a bit different though.
How so?
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Offshoring to India is an idle threat due to radically different work cultures and expectations.
Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.