> The goal of bringing workers from other countries to the US is to reduce
> the cost of labor by increasing the supply.  I can hear corporations
> everywhere saying, "There's no way I'm going to pay $15/hour for a
> programmer!" (corporations are people, so I can hear them).  There has
> been a huge movement in the past several decades to crush the American
> worker and this is just one more part of that long battle.

I'm don't know enough about H-1B visas to make a good decision, but I
do know that having someone you can work with face-to-face and who is
culturally compatible with your company is a factor in the ROI
formula.

I'm American and even working with other Americans is a challenge when
you're not working face to face. Email, chat and video conferencing
only go so far in building trust and rapport with your co-workers.

Once you've got enough need, then it's worth dealing with that
additional overhead, but for many small businesses it's more effective
to pay more for local programmers/whatever.

> Draining the world of intellectual talent is not
> necessarily a long-term win for us.  It should be good to have an educated
> elite in every nation that is highly favorable to the USA.  Turning away
> more immigrants will help achieve that goal.

This is part of why I'm not sure about H-1B visas. If we're employing
high-tech people on a rotating basis then we lose a potential job
position for Americans and don't retain the experience and knowledge
of that person over the long term. I would probably be more in favor
of a convenient/rapid path to naturalization for people coming to fill
tech positions. They'd be more likely to be here for life, and we as a
country would benefit from that over the long run.

--
Michael