[aspensmonster]

A piece on immigration as it relates to skilled labour with no mention of H-1B? If you aren't investigating the primary manner by which skilled foreign labour finds itself in the states, then you're never going to get a good answer to the question: "Do immigrant engineers depress [native] engineer wages?"

Of course, an H-1B visa is technically a non-immigrant visa, which goes a long way in investigating the question by itself. It's somewhat misleading to even call them "immigrant engineers" if most them are on a temporary visa that ties them to a sponsoring company and requires them to leave once time is up. This clouds the issue of supply and demand, as the labour pools are really quite different: foreign nationals who are tied to a specific company and are only permitted to reside for X years, versus natives who are free to work for any company and can live here indefinitely. It _is_ obvious that the native is going to be able to command a far higher salary than an H-1B that is stuck with his "sponsor."

Now, whether companies are pushing for more H1-B's because of this wage suppressing factor, or because there is an unresolvable shortage of native talent, is the million dollar question. And it's a question that, in my mind, is readily answered. Convert the H1-B into a full-on green card, wherein the skilled foreign labour is granted all of the rights and privileges of a native. If the shortage really is unresolvable --for whatever reason-- then companies still have all the skilled foreign labour they would need; the companies' staffing concerns are still addressed. And since the foreign national is permitted to live and work wherever he pleases (he is essentially identical to a native applicant at this point), the argument of wage suppression is significantly weakened, since the main argument is that there really _are_ natives willing and able to do the jobs but they're getting priced out of the market because they can't compete with locked-in H-1B holders.

The skilled immigrants win. The companies still get their skilled labour and win. If there really are natives ready and willing to do the jobs, then they too will win.