From what I have seen who gets laid-off, there are a lot of really bad engineers, especially in the software area. Then there are those that have not learned anything new in years and have become obsolete. Surprisingly, this can frequently hit young people that did not bother with the basics, but went straight to "Java Script Engineer" or the like but cannot do anything else and cannot learn due to missing general computing skills.
You cannot do "cheap oversees engineering" for anything that requires good engineers. For bad engineers that maybe reach the "works somehow" product quality level, you can. If you are bad at what you do, you are always easy to replace, no matter the job.