[theptip]

I'm not sure I buy this argument. Each tech job in the Bay Area creates ~4 other jobs[1]. So currently it's a net win for the country to bring someone in to fill a role in that sector. The people who lose out in that case aren't your hypothetical middle-class American, they are tech workers whose salaries go down somewhat because the supply of labour in their sector increased.

Another way of putting that same fact is that tech jobs are paid well above the mean salary, and so they necessarily increase the country's GDP per capita. Bring in more people like this! Give them a green card instead of making it hard for smart people to plant roots in the US! It'll boost our economy and generate more service sector jobs as well.

You could make a case that if you trained up an unemployed coal miner to do the job you'd create another job on top of the 4 that we already created, but it's not clear why you'd go to all that effort to create one job when you could just grant another green card to another tech worker and create 4 jobs; why would a company spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars training someone who might work out, when there are plenty of applicants in the world who are ready to do good work now?

As I see it the only coherent argument against more foreign tech workers is a political/sociological one noting that America is becoming increasingly xenophobic (due to concerns about low-skilled immigrants), and increasing immigration (even if it was solely high-skilled) would cause even more political instability than we've seen in the last year. But I don't see an economic argument against it.

[1]: http://www.bayareacouncil.org/community_engagement/new-study...