[yurisagalov]

actually, I am not claiming at all that interns are half-able, incompetent newbies. Some of our best work has been done by people interning with us, and I think our past interns will vouch for that. That being said, it is true that intern salaries are generally lower than full time salaries (although the gap is shrinking, IMO), and intern salaries are good indicators of full time salaries in tech.

[anthony_d]

The thing is that a highly paid intern in no way refutes the argument that immigration is about cheap labor. The argument is that 1) because domestic labor is expensive companies want to increase H1B's as a way to decrease cost 2) if you didn't mind paying more you could find domestic labor. The highly paid intern is an point in favor of #1.

Nothing in the article disputes the basic economics of #2. Sure there is competition for talent, there is competition in every facet of business. The trick is to find the ratio between how much value a business extracts from a resource and how much value the business provides to the resource; that ratio needs to stay above 1.