[geofft]

Still not sure what this has to do with the article - the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans. Should the American companies do without, then? How will that help American companies compete against Chinese companies?

[unishark]

In terms of simple microeconomics they need to offer more pay. It's supply and demand for labor. The entire temporary visa game is practically designed to warp the economics. Step 1: hire a ton of temporary workers during boom years and more accommodating political times to up the supply of labor, step 2: demonstrate that you can't find new people with paying the going market rate in a market already dominated by those temporary workers, and hence can only continue the status quo by bringing in yet more temporary workers. Well no kidding.

US students who choose to go into other areas which are protected politically (like medicine) are responding rationally.

Also US firms' unwillingness, by and large, to train new hires is another artificial and solvable aspect of the problem.

[renewiltord]

The idea that Mike Janicek and Bob Mansfield are the only guys willing to do the work for the incredibly low fees Apple will provide while all these manufacturing engineers turn up their noses beggars belief.

[geofft]

OK, but the article also gives multiple examples of having to hire back the same (American) worker after they left because nobody else could do it.

So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case throwing government regulation at the market to artificially restrict supply certainly won't help anything, or companies are able but unwilling to pay high enough wages, at which point we're proposing using government regulation to punish American businesses who don't work the way we want in the hope that they concede defeat, which hardly strikes me as a pro-American position - and more practically doesn't seem like a way to make American business more competitive.

[unishark]

> So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case..

Perhaps not though, in which case we don't need to follow this line of thinking to the end of the world. The US isn't lacking in college students or workers, just ones willing to work in one of the hardest majors while being treated as a commodity that includes workers from developing countries.

[masonic]

   the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans.

The article makes no such case. It merely quotes Apple executives claiming that with no supporting data.

Apple has spent most of a generation offshoring all of its manufacturing. Now, they whine that people stopped pursuing manufacturing-oriented degrees (because there weren't domestic jobs anymore for them to land in)?

It's like the Menendez brothers seeking sentencing leniency "because, hey, we're orphans now!"