[aznjons]

Even if H1B employees are not underpaid, artificially increasing the supply of highly-demanded technical talent prevents tech giants from needing to raise compensation across the board. Artificially seems to be a justifiable characterization for a number of reasons.

1. At least intuitively, raising wages should attract educated/intellectually capable people from other industries domestically. The corporations have already been reprimanded by the DoJ for instituting anti-competitive practices regarding poaching.

2. Attracting technical talent from other countries would seem to decrease the supply of talent in those places, which may have relatively less resources than the U.S. to train and retain technically skilled workers; what would be the consequences in the source countries?

3. Finally, attracting highly educated workers to a specific industry and specific corporations with hefty resources concentrates a relatively/currently inelastic supply of skilled workers. More explicitly stated, the question might be: how much social good/utility does a company like Facebook or LinkedIn really produce and what would be the result of concentrating highly-educated talent there?