[geebee]

I think the argument is that if a company didn't get more value from its programmers by locating them in San Francisco, they wouldn't pay more to locate them there.

For instance, christmas tree light manufacturers don't locate their assembly plants in downtown san francisco. If they did, they would certainly have to pay the workers more. You just can't generate enough value this way to justify that kind of pay for christmas tree light assemblers, so the work is done elsewhere.

And if it turns out assembling christmas tree lights doesn't pay enough, and the workers who are capable of assembling christmas tree lights find higher paid work, that's not a shortage, that just means people have found higher value things to do. If the price of christmas tree lights doesn't rise to a point where it is worth hiring people, that just means people don't really value christmas tree lights as much as the other things they an spend their money on. I see no problem here.

Same with code. If you can't pay enough to convince the people capable of writing code to do this instead of something else, I have trouble believing the code you want written is all that important. Certainly not so important that you should have the power to force people to write it for you as a condition of living and working in the US!