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Aviva W.'s avatar

Very well said, Jordan. I’m an electrical engineer, and fortunately the state school I went to in the early 90s was almost entirely American students. I understand that’s not the case today.

This country invented the transistor, the computer, we built the first rockets and landed on the moon and Mars. Our culture of innovation leads to such things. We need to encourage American students to study STEM and then incentivize companies to hire them.

I briefly worked for a major tech company. My coworkers were 75% Indian and maybe another 20% Asian. Most of them were perfectly mediocre. (Then the company instituted a hiring freeze and declared all new work would be outsourced to their offices in India.) We can and should demand better than mediocre.

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zuFpM5*M's avatar

"There aren't enough qualified Americans with the correct technical skills," bemoans the tech company as they underpay foreign workers that they overwork and treat like serfs under constant threat of deportation. "We just don't understand why Americans don't want to take the positions on the same terms as H1B workers," they cry as those worker's entire family are living at 1/50th the cost of living in America.

It isn't hard to understand what is going on. This is the most basic concept of the free market: if there isn't enough of something, offer to pay more. Once the pay is high enough, the US will produce more qualified people. What tech companies do is the opposite: they pay less by exploiting worker visa programs and then they complain that they need more visa workers to work at the lower wages since no one else will.

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