> 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