Webform to Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Immigration Bill to Boost High-Tech Innovation
In the larger picture, I'm all for people moving wherever they want in the world, but when it comes to immigration to increase "high-tech innovation" there are several caveats to consider:
Companies have narrowed their "skill sets" to be check lists rather than overall considerations, thus limiting the number of Americans available for the jobs offered.
Companies seek to pay the lowest wages possible; increasing the number of immigrants allows them to select from a larger pool of workers who will be satisfied with smaller wages. See "Norm Matloff's H-1B page: cheap labor, age discrimination, offshoring", updated in 2011 or later. Rep. Zoe Lofgren found that the H-1B wages were $40,000 less than the average wage for computer systems analysts in her district.
Companies are unwilling to pay the taxes to provide the education needed to create a large pool of knowledge workers. They would rather that other countries pay to educate a significant number of their workers.
[I didn't include this in my webform to Sen. Klobuchar, but see also "Is There a Tech Staff Shortage?" I wrote it for the Northland Reader in October 1999.]
Adam Smith warned of special interests like this in "Wealth of Nations":
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [capitalists], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
