On Fri, 8 Feb 2013, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 07:48:25AM -0800, Ubu Sumner wrote:
>
>> "....Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar's legislation to increase H-1B visas 
>> and green card quotas is welcome and will help the U.S. economy. The 
>> jobs that are offered will only be located where there are not 
>> sufficient qualified local citizens...."
>
> Businesses will go whether the costs are lower, so they will either 
> lower costs here or go to China, India, Vietnam in search for cheaper 
> workforce.

Doesn't that kind of thinking lead to a "race to the bottom" where every 
worker must compete internationally to accept the lowest wages in the 
world in order to get a job and feed himself?  I can see how that system 
would work for some people, but not for anyone on this list.

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.

Unemployment is high party because the big corporations like it this way. 
If people are unemployed, they'll work for cheap.

They'll replace us with robots, with foreign workers, any way they can. 
They just want more for themselves.  They don't care about the long-term 
effects.

We have to try to fix the damage, to get our jobs back and to preserve our 
future earnings.  Stopping a flood of immigrants and insisting on decent 
wages instead would be a reasonable first step in the right direction.

My wife came here on an H-1B, so I am not unsympathetic to the problems of 
immigrants, but they don't have to immigrate -- they can stay in their 
countries and fix them.  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.

Mike