Mike makes the essential point about the H1-B visa fight: the job market isn’t a zero-sum game. Granting more visas doesn’t mean fewer jobs for Americans, except possibly in the very short run. More skilled workers make companies more successful, creating new jobs. Moreover, some immigrants go on to start companies of their own, which wind up employing more Americans.
But I think Mike was too kind to this article purporting to debunk the notion that there’s a shortage of skilled IT workers. On one level, it’s just a totally nonsensical issue. The demand for workers is a curve, not a point. At a salary of $80,000/year, some number of IT workers would be hired. You’d see significantly fewer hired if the average salary were $100,000, and significantly more at $60,000/year. So the question isn’t whether there is “a skill shortage.” The question is what effects restricting the supply of IT workers will have on wages and on the growth of the technology industry. Most likely the answers are that restricting immigration of IT workers means that native IT workers will enjoy modestly higher wages at the expense of a somewhat smaller and less productive technology industry. This is good for IT workers, of course, which is why there’s considerable sympathy for it among the Slashdot crowd. But it’s not good for much of anyone else, and like most forms of protectionism, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. IT workers are already among the best-compensated professions around, and I see no reason that truck drivers and school teachers should pay higher prices or enjoy fewer high-tech products in order to prop up the wages of workers who already get paid twice as much as them.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.