I had thought for a long time that the best way to protect yourself from outside competition was to be in a service job that required hands-on work. E.g., Someone in Bangalore isn't suddenly going to be repairing the transmission on your car. A retired Canadian fellow I was talking with a week or so ago nixed that simple idea.

He said that workers from Central America were being imported into Canadian cities (I think he specifically mentioned Toronto) to do construction work. The natural result was to drive down wages for Canadian construction workers. If I had thought about the problem a little more, I would have realized that there's no inherently low-wage-competition proof profession. Either the work can move to a low-wage country, or the low-wage workers can be imported. There will be a lot of short and medium-term pain for a lot of people as a result. :-(

Cheers,
Scott.