[untog]

There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world.

You could argue that this is the actual natural order of things. Let the free market decide the value of an engineer, not arbitrary government regulation. It is the Silicon Valley way, after all.

[rayiner]

Government control of immigration is a natural consequence of government establishing and defending a border. If you want to take the free market to its logical conclusion, we should get rid of that too, and leave Silicon Valley to its own devices vis-à-vis fending off hostile foreign actors. Historically that sort of thing has not worked out well.

[chetanahuja]

Note that the products/services made by these immigrants are sold globally, not just in the US. Google, for example, acquires more than 50% of it's revenues from outside the US.

If you don't object to google's selling it's services across the world on free-market principles, it'll take a rather large leap of (il)logic to constrain the employment to be restricted to the physical location of the HQ of this global company.

[rayiner]

Movement of residents is fundamentally different than movement of goods. Moreover, nothing constrains Google from hiring people in locations outside the US to service those markets.

[yulaow]

Free market is strongly against "Cartels". Because, yeah, ceo-cartels are another way of arbitrary regulation. See them as a "maximum wage fixed" and you get why.

[samstave]

UH, CEO collusion is the same as "arbitrary [executive] regulation"....

The free market is what the actual value of the engineers is - not how the CEOs choose to work together to suppress prices.

[untog]

Oh, I know. I wasn't disputing that. Just making an observation on perspective - that the current system of limited immigration is not the fairest, but it's in the interests of developers today to resist it being changed.

[freyrs3]

The natural order of things is that we have a process in place to create and change government regulation. If someone thinks that process is inflexible or arbitrary doesn't given the prerogative to break the law to get around it.

[SixSigma]

The natural order of things is the formation of powerful groups that ruthlessly exploit their environment. Ironically the Free Market needs governments to provide the institutions in which it can operate.