IBM: The cost difference is too great for business not to look for H1B workers

My take on all of this is that bringing in foreigners in this way destroys the whole supply and demand setup of jobs and employees.

As an example, let's say company A wants to hire a salaried employee for $x. After 6 months of not finding anyone, they should offer more money, etc. until eventually someone is found. If this is across the country for a given profession, then more students will be educated in that field, and the supply of employees will match the demand that has grown and salaries will go up and down in relation to how well the supply matches the demand.

With programs like the H1B and similar, when Company A doesn't find an employee for $x, they don't have to offer more money, they just bring in someone from overseas. In this way Company A is getting employees for less than the supply/demand equation says it should be able to in their local country.

This means Company A makes bigger profits, and people inside the given country are now earning a lower wage than they otherwise should be if Company A had to raise salaries because of a lack of supply of employees for the demand in the given field.

Here in Canada it happens all the time. All the big players (McDonalds, Wal-Mart, KFC, etc.) have an agreement with the govt. where they don't even have to go through the process to hire a foreign worker, it's automatically rubber stamped. When they can't find a local to work for minimum wage, they just bring in a foreigner to do it. So now even though there is not a supply of Canadians willing to work at KFC for minimum wage, KFC can fill those positions, have higher profits, and there are thousands (millions?) of people living in Canada with a standard of living below that which the average Canadian will accept. In my town tehre are lots of foreigners living 10 to a house because they don't earn enough money to do it any other way.

This is not a good thing for a country, or the people in it. It is a good thing for the big companies that now make bigger profits, thanks to being able to get employees at a lower salary.

1. Most H1B workers are under 30, and most unemployed American programmers are over 35. This is by far the biggest part of the iceberg, made invisible by the fact that these people drop out of statistics.

2. Visa handcuffs are not slavery per say, but close enough. (If you think that's an overly dramatic statement, you are probably not an immigrant from some place you really don't want to be, like me, or someone whose family will quite literally starve if you don't send them money). People endure getting beat up by their husbands for 5 years straight for the sake of a green card, so there is no doubt they will endure long working hours and much more.

3. The whole "shortage of IT talent" hysteria is way overblown when you look at the actual numbers. Just one example, latest DICE salary report:

http://media.dice.com/report/2012-2011-dice-salary-survey/

Contrast the opening sentence:

Technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to the 2012-2011 Salary Survey from Dice, the leading career site for technology and engineering professionals.

... with the actual numbers:

After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than two percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010.

So, let's see. While the inflation is chugging along at ~3% per year, we get 2 flat years, followed by a 1% increase? So basically, we make less money each year?

Is the tech industry an economic miracle? Are programmers the one must-have product whose prices get lower when it's in short supply and the buyers have pockets full of cash? Or is there a simpler explanation?

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The problem is simple to sum up: highly skilled workers aren't going to sneak across the Channel Tunnel/Rio Grande very often. They'll stick to as-legal-as-possible means because generally they're respectable tradesmen, who've invested a lot of time/money in their skills and want to use them as best as they can.

Unfortunately, these government-encouraged means of immigration/foreign-workers are the easiest things to stop. Hence an 'immigration clampdown to save the jobs of the natives' really consists of blocking the vast majority of the foreigners you might actually want to move to your country.