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

If you read more carefully I never wrote that; I was only replying to it. Moreover you're exaggerating the original post. Anyways I'm just providing a different point of view, to which most people on HN are more open to.

> Cry me a river. No one is forcing anyone to come to the US.

Coming from the US middle class to work in another country is different from coming from the middle class in India (or another 3rd world country) to work in the US. They don't have as much economic freedom (or international mobility) as we do.

> Don't like it, simply go home.

That's the problem. Most of them like living here. Some of them don't really have much of choice either given how many family members they have to support. I'm sure there are a lot of companies and managers that treat them well here. Unfortunately I'm also pretty sure that there are a lot of companies and manager that take advantage of them as well (i.e. work extra hours under the table and I'll see about sponsoring you for a green card.) Having a hard time switching companies really sucks.

Given your work experience in both China and Korea, I would be surprised if you didn't experience some of that as well. However, unlike most H1B workers in the US; you probably have better options when you come back home.

Where I worked, there was a massive pay disparity among non-immigrant workers. People hired out of college would be making $45,000 a year, while people that had been at the company for a few years and hired away from a well-paying job would be making $150,000 a year. (Raises were basically given via counter-offer matches, as far as I could tell.) There's then plenty of leeway to pay your H1Bs $60,000 a year, which is a rather low programmer's salary, while still paying some Americans less.

I think the key loophole is that you have to pay a certain average amount based on region and job code, but that region includes the suburbs and rural areas and the job code includes all of "senior architect" and "test engineer intern". So you can pay someone a "suburbs" salary instead of a city salary, and pay them a non-financial-services-firm salary even though they work for an investment bank, and then pay them like the lowest-level "computer programmer" American regardless of their job responsibilities.

Anyway, if my previous employer's goal was to attract the best talent by paying great salaries, they failed. I still have nightmares about the time I had to explain to someone with "10 years of experience" what an array was. (He wrote something like: if day == 0: return "Monday" elif day == 1: return "Tuesday". But I digress.)

In manufacturing at least, the big technological drive (which we have seen in the last half decade) is towards flexible, low cost automation which fixes the problems of existing automation (extreme R&D and capital cost and total inflexibility). While lowering the barriers for getting things onto the market (which can be done just by reclaiming the manufacturing base taken by China), it will almost surely destroy the manufacturing based working class (which is about a tenth of the US's GDP).