The law of supply and demand applies to labor.

When supply increases or demand decreases the price of a commodity(like labor) goes down. Producers make less, supply decreases and the price reaches a balance. It’s a nice feedback system that works well, It’s called Capitalism and Free trade.

When Government interferes in the Free market that is socialism or Communism.

These Cheap visa indentured servants who lack the rights of Americans to change jobs, join unions, negotiate salaries, and who are baited with the Carrot of U.S. citizenship and the favorable exchange rate do nothing to help this country.

More Visas = greater supply of engineers= lower wages = less Americans entering field = lobbying for more cheap labor H1B’s…..

Less visas = increased wages for engineers = Americans entering field = Less visas needed.

The companies who whine about the lack of engineers are the same ones who glorify free trade with country’s that have lower standards of living, and few if any enforced labor or environmental laws.

For the PC crowd: does anyone know the proportion of male to female visas? I see very few women getting these, shouldn’t it be around %50 or is the program deliberately sexist?

Particularly the irrational mind that is in DENIAL.

That ain’t just a river in egypt, lol

Since you’re only convinced with numbers, the National Statistics Office said that unemployment rates for technical/professional jobs is at 13% FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS. There, all the proof you needed.

Let’s take a look at some statistics.

About the Engineering Gap – from Businessweek.

Quoting a Duke report, the U.S. was graduating 222,335 engineers, vs. 215,000 from India. The closest comparable number reported by China is 644,106, but it includes additional majors. Looking strictly at four-year degrees and without considering accreditation or quality, the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers, vs. 112,000 from India. China reported 351,537 under a broader category. All of these numbers include information technology and related majors (click here to read the full Duke report).

The question that needs to be answered is: How many of the 200K + engineering graduates are American and how many are aliens, returning to their home country after graduation??

Business Week’s Michael Mandel (September 15, 2005: ) compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001 and discovered a 12.7% decline in computer science pay, a 12% decline in computer engineering pay, and a 10.2% decline in electrical engineering pay. Marketing salaries experienced a 6.5% decline and business administration salaries fell 5.7%. Despite Sarbanes-Oxley, a make-work law for accountants, even accounting majors were offered 2.3% less.

Using the same sources as the Business Week article (salary data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and BLS data for inflation adjustment), Professor Norm Matloff at the University of California, Davis, made the same comparison for master degree graduates. He found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for master degrees in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering fell 6.6%, 13.7%, and 9.4% respectively.

How many jobs are being created? That’s an interesting question. But what we DO know is that salaries for professionals in these areas are not increasing, as they should….if ‘supply and demand’ were in fact working.

So the question is…why isn’t it working? What are these lower salaries due to or a result of? Could it possibly be that jobs that are offshored are comparably expensive to American science and engineering graduates and so they are not being paid what they would have been?

Certainly the decreases aren’t a result of inflation…!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) payroll jobs data , over the past half-decade (January 2001—January 2006) the US economy created 1,050,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,009,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,059,000. That is seven million jobs short of keeping up with population growth, definitely a serious job shortfall.

And we don’t know if the majority of those jobs are McDonald’s and Starbucks. What percentage of new jobs are related to science and engineering?

Maybe our friends who are so knowledgeable here can shed some light on the answers to some of these questions. The statistics that I’ve been able to find are outlining a frightening picture for college graduates in the technical areas.

Cheers

Your deductions are based on complete fallacies. You’ve very adroitly rationalized the entire affair to your own satisfaction.

Having worked with foreign electronic engineers in the past, I can assure you that they do not hold a candle to American engineers, nor can they write coherent standard operational procedures, as English is not their primary language – leaving the poor test technicians scratching their heads as to the true course of action in testing the operation of a poorly developed piece of electronic apparatus.

But, be that as it may, the real concern here is not foreigners taking American jobs, but rather foreign spies compromising sensitive trade secrets.

In the 1990′s, I worked on satellites at Space Systems / Loral in Palo Alto, California. Bubba (Pres. Bill Clinton) cozied up with China, facilitating the working relationship between China and Space Systems / Loral (Bernard Schwartz was the CEO SS/L). On numerous occasions, I personally witnessed the Chinese making copious notes on sensitive information. I relayed my concerns to upper management and was promptly “blacklisted.” Suffice to say, I quit my job over that scandal. Bernard Schwartz was investigated a few years later, but nothing really came of that.

Now, China has our technology and is actively building and launching satellites of their own, based on the information they obtained from espionage activities at Space Systems/Loral and the launch facilities at the cape in Florida and Kourou in South America. But, again that is not the main problem. The main problem is that they also used that technology to build Satellite Killers and to blind our satellites when they fly over China – giving them a significant military advantage should we ever (heaven forbid) be forced to wage war with them.

Espionage and criminal activity, not a fear of job loss – for there is a copious supply of jobs out there for everyone, are the key poins of contention with hiring foreigners and placing them in sensitive areas.

Cheers

So your employers are giving their work, their jobs (theirs, not yours because they own them, you don’t) to other people instead of you. Whether they bring the people to your country or whether they send the jobs out to be done makes only minor differences.

The ideology part of the statement is not what borders on bigotry (I didn’t say racism). It’s the implication that there is no honesty, no hard working people, none who are loyal, and none who are competent outside of those countries considered first world is the part that is bordering on bigotry. This is why I asked you to clarify that statement. You could have clarified it with regards to ideology, but you clarified it by country. And yet when challenged you attempt to justify it by talking about ideology.

Your statement about ideology is true, people of all races are deceived by them. Which also means that people of all races are liberated by good ideologies. You cannot truthfully, claim that all foreigners embrace bad ideologies any more than you can claim that all natives embrace good ones.

But like you said, you are perfectly comfortable making a statement that is as false as the ones jihadists and radical islamists make about the west. The fact that you are comfortable doing that speaks of a fundamental disagreement between you and I that colors all future discussion

So here we stand, fundamentally disagreeing and having the “most important point” unsupported by any visible statistics. And while I do understand that you may not wish to spend the time finding it for one individual, I hope that you eventually do find some first-hand statistics and post them in these comments so that anyone who stumbles across this post like I did could see the empirical basis upon which you are making your argument.
In the meantime I will be bowing out. It’s been interesting debating with you. If you ever feel the desire to contact me, to continue this conversation or for some other reason, you have my email address.
Good night, and God bless.

Be that as it may, I sense such a tremendous degree of stubborn ill will from you that I have begun to suspect that you have some personal ax to grind in this matter. No matter which documents or statistics I present here, you will make some disparaging remark, such as calling the articles “surface level,” without actually refuting anything in the articles themselves. Those articles DO make a valid point – it is that you are strongly motivated not to acknowledge that point!

No, not all foreign nationals are Islamic/socialist. Some are merely one or the other, and some are neither. But the fact is that we don’t need any of them here, and it is impossible to do a good enough background check to pick out the good ones from the others.

And yes, you are bad at economics.

The principles of economics would imply that although there would be this problem at first, supply and demand means that the system would adjust itself so that the workers get equitable wages.

“Equitable” at what level? You are saying that the US is obligated to take in everybody who wants to flee from dysfunctional economies throughout the world, so that our wages and those of the Third World will meet at some “equitable” level – that would not represent what anybody in the US would now consider to be a living wage. As much as I don’t like to think such thoughts, I find myself hoping that you will very soon get to experience for yourself the joys of living at such an “equitable” wage, so that you will finally comprehend the situation that you insist that I am obligated to accept as normal!

Typical of people like you, as soon as you run out of viable arguments, you play the “racism” card:

This statement is in the same vein as saying that all Jews are dishonest, or all Southeners are stupid, or all black people are violent. It’s both patently untrue, and borders on bigotry. Ironically, it’s also exactly the same way that radical Islam portrays America. Are you comfortable in making a statement that has such pristine company?

The answer is yes – I do feel perfectly comfortable in making such a statement. Radical Islamists make remarks like that about us, but except for where temporary oil wealth obscures the real lack of productivity, their countries provide such a subhuman standard of living that it’s a complete joke. Like the Communists, the Islamists try to claim that their “utopia” will take hold after they conquer the whole world and impose their system on it, but I’m not buying it. On the other hand, the developed countries of the world have the rule of law and a certain level of social trust that makes civil society possible. I want to live among people who have been brought up to believe in the rule of law, not among those who consider kleptocracy, endless bureaucratic cronyism and corruption, endemic tribal warfare, or ongoing brigandage to be the normal state of affairs!

It is extremely reprehensible of you to play the “racism” card when you run out of arguments on an issue that has nothing to do with race. Socialism is not a race. Communism is not a race. Islam is not a race. Those are all IDEOLOGIES. People of all races are deluded by them!

Ideologies, for good or for ill, are belief systems that are embodied in the attitudes and behavior of the individuals who subscribe to them. Each individual has the CHOICE whether to believe in an ideology, or to go on looking for something closer to the truth.

But you keep ignoring the most important point! There is NO shortage of American tech workers, and foreign workers in those fields present an unacceptable security risk. There is NO reason why any more foreign workers, especially tech workers, should be allowed into the US. There is NO reason to allow those who are already here to remain any longer!

Regarding point 5. I understand that this blog is specifically anti-islam, but not all foreign nationals are islamic/socialist. Quite frankly, those articles are quite surface level and don’t seem to be making much more of a study/argument beyond a single correlation, when there are several other correlation and factors that should be examined, if only so they can be dismissed. The rest talk about foreign aid, and are interesting discussions but wasn’t a part of the discussion we were having.

How could you possibly know so little about economics that you would not understand this?

The principles of economics would imply that although there would be this problem at first, supply and demand means that the system would adjust itself so that the workers get equitable wages.

Anyway, I do want to get back to point 5 for a bit.

Not unique to America, but unique to the developed world.

This statement is in the same vein as saying that all Jews are dishonest, or all Southeners are stupid, or all black people are violent. It’s both patently untrue, and borders on bigotry. Ironically, it’s also exactly the same way that radical Islam portrays America. Are you comfortable in making a statement that has such pristine company?

2) Maybe your experiences have not revealed the total failure of the “safeguards” in the H-1b program, but everybody else seems to know about it by now. Employers go to great lengths to work the system at the expense of American workers. There’s a whole cottage industry of lawyers who specialize in facilitating the mass immigration of foreign tech workers at the expense of MORE qualified American workers.

For your viewing pleasure: Fake Job Ads defraud Americans to secure green cards for foreign workers

3) Daily Kos is a hard-left website that regularly provides a venue for foulmouthed, anti-Semitic, anti-American, and pro-jihadist ranting and raving. I provided the link only because I was quoting a conversation on LGF that used Kos as an example of how the left is allying itself with the enemies of the American tech worker.

4) Regarding your assertion that removing the need for H-1b would end the displacement of American tech workers:

I would agree that the need to find one particular employer to sponsor an H-1b visa holder does put foreign tech workers in a poorer bargaining position with regard to wages. But once an employer has absorbed the cost of sponsoring the H-1b worker, when it is time to decide whom to let go, the employer will keep the H-1b worker, so as not to lose that investment, but will instead discard the US citizen worker, who is being paid at a slightly higher rate anyway.

On the other hand, scrapping the already dysfunctional H-1b program in favor of allowing an unlimited influx of foreign H-1b workers would only drive wages even further down for all tech workers. This glut of knowledge workers would make it even less likely that a US citizen tech worker will find a permanent job. The upshot is that any employer can order up an unlimited number of contractors for a pittance, the very instant they are needed, and dump them out on the street the very instant they are not needed. How could you possibly know so little about economics that you would not understand this?

5) “Are you saying that the qualities of hard-working, dedicated, honest, loyal, and eminently competent are particularly American qualities and are generally not present among people from the third world?”

Not unique to America, but unique to the developed world. Poor countries are poor and remain poor because
they lack the rule of law (which NOT mean shari’a!) and instead are mired in a culture of corruption. Culture is embodied in the belief systems and the behavior of individual people. Immigrants from poor countries have been indoctrinated with ideologies, such as socialism and/or Islam, that are incompatible with the US Constitution and that can never form the basis for a viable civil society.

Third-world poverty myths

Make the Rule of Law a Necessary Condition for the Millenium Challenge Account

FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE: Global Poverty and the World Bank

Muslim Poverty, Response to Nuray

Islam and Economic Development

People arriving en masse from poor countries retain their old mindset unless given strong incentives to do otherwise. At present, with the multiculturalist propaganda in the US and other western nations, we no
longer put any pressure on immigrants to adopt our world view and to fit in. You can see the results in western Europe right now – they have imported hordes of jihadists who make no secret of their intentions to undermine the societies that have so foolishly allowed them to settle there.

6) By far the most important point is one that you refused to address: There is NO shortage of American engineering and IT workers, and never has been! Hence, there is NO justification for allowing even one foreign tech worker to come to US shores, and there is NO justification for allowing any noncitizen tech workers already here to remain any longer. End the visa program NOW, send them ALL home without delay, and watch the economic revival of the US begin to happen!