They're stealing our jobs! Heh, sorry couldn't resist. An interesting story (for those who follow immigration) of the little known OPT program, which has a staggering 411,000 foreign workers here, far exceeding the more common H1-B Visa program. The STEM Graduate System Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It. But to me, the real take away is this: "...the U.S. had between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupations that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering, they found. So, OPT participants accounted for anywhere from one-third to one-half of new hires. If you add H-1B candidates, up to two-thirds of openings went to guest workers, according to Salzman." This is unbelievable. This program needs to be seriously curtailed.
The issue is, they are paying those foreign-born workers much less than it would cost to get an American to get all that education and training and do the job. On top of that, a lot of these tech industries are in very expensive cities (like San Francisco and San Jose in the Bay Area), and to hire American professionals to do those jobs, you would have to pay them a lot of money, to compensate them for the extremely high costs of rent and housing to live nearby. I am aware of many stories of people in other states who were offered what seemed like great paying jobs to move to San Francisco, but then when they got there they realized they'd have to be paying more than half their income just to rent a small room in a house together with lots of other people, and even that type of housing accommodation was hard to find. If it wasn't for foreign skilled workers brought in on a visa, most of these tech companies would probably have to relocate to lower cost of living areas. But the tech company CEOs don't want to do that. They want to live in a city that's trendy, progressive and beautiful.
But as a public policy matter, it makes little sense to allow rich CEO's to have coolie labor, to the detriment of American workers, just so they can live in trendy cities.
