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Gates Calls for Increase in Tech Labor Supply
Randeep Igochyorjob writes "Reuters is reporting that
Bill Gates is asking for the removal of quotas for guest workers by removing the caps on non-immigrant alien workers. In a mild attempt at balance, buried near the end of the story, the article also says "Undersecretary of Commerce Phil Bond, a top Bush administration technology official, pointed out that the unemployment rate for engineers is above the national average." I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative"."
Sounds like he wants a bunch of foreign workers who wouldn't quibble over a $20,000-30,000 salary where a US coder would expect a bit more.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe the american ones are too expensive?
These wouldn't happen to be faux engineers would they? The dime a dozen Ameritrain, cram all you possibly can about pointing and clicking the night before the test Miscrosoft Certified System Engineer's?
I find it hard to believe that it is difficult to find qualified individuals within the United States. Especially after the last four years the industry has been through.
Should we be opposed to this? Considering that the alternative is shipping the jobs outside the US, if we keep the wage-earners inside the US, the residual income from the job will stay (for the most part) inside the US. Might not be as good as every last engineer drawing a top dollar salary, but its better than 100% of the spending going away from the US.
And I guess Phil Bond has tried to hire a good engineer lately? We've been trying to hire good engineers for 12 months in Seattle. Of 500 resumes, 50 got interviews but we have only hired 5. Several got better offers, including some from Microsoft.
Just because a small percentage of IT engineers are unemployed doesn't mean they deserve a job. Many of the engineers I've interviewed are unemployable. I'd jump at the chance to hire some good foreign engineers. They would get paid the same salaries as US engineers but would cost us more due to lawyers and relocation costs.
And I'd rather compete against a guy here making $50K sitting next to me than the same guy over in India making $15K.
But if you open the floodgates, then wages here will be cut in half and hardly any American college students will enter the field.
I think he does have a point. We've come to a point where our workforce sometime cannot compete with the brightest that come from other nations. I think Gates has point here, in the interests of keeping the US a leader in technology - but at the same time, I don't think this is the long-term solution. We need to do a better job of education, revamping the public school system because it isn't working across the board the way it should.
THEN we can talk about staying a world technology leader.
Inviting guest worker is better than outsourcing the jobs, because by inviting the guest worker at the least it will also improve the local economy around the company, and increase the state and city tax revenue.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
Translation: "the available labour wants more money than we want to pay."
Given the size of his cash pile I doubt Gates wants low paid employees. Microsoft is famous for ridiculous bonuses and salaries, and I doubt the shareholders begrudge them given the historical returns on investment. No, what Bill wants are the best employees. The artificial labor market restriction means he cannot do so.
At the moment, engineers are at a low point in terms of their employment prospects and hence their bargaining position. The engineers are at their weakest now, making this the ideal time to strike.
The other part of this is that the wheels of government turn slowly. By the time this is all ironed out, there will likely be an upturn. If BG waits until then to make his request it will be both too late, and the engineers will be stronger again.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you have 500 resumes and you can't find 12 candidates, then you're just too damn picky. Period.
This is supply and demand folks. If you can't find the supply, then demand less. Don't screw us all by attempting to artificially increase the supply.
Entirely untrue. Over $15 billion is sent home to Mexico from US migrants every year - Mexico's 2nd largest source of foreign revenue (behind oil). H1B visa employees virtually invariably have family remaining in the old country and large sums of cash will be wired back home.
There are more than enough skilled, talented tech people in the US to fill all the jobs. There are even enough to replace the slovenly incompetents who blow enough smoke to convince the non-techie managers that they need to stick around. It has been this way for years. Shortly after my position was shipped to Mexico City and I was politely encouraged to leave the building 's CEO gave a speech about how was in dire need of good, qualified tech people. I promptly sent a letter pointing out that I was willing to relocate anywhere in the world, work any shift and reminded them that I had a perfect employment record as a sub-contractor on an project, aced every aptitude/performance test they threw my way and quickly mastered every new system/process they created. My request was ignored, so I could only conclude that 's plea for capable, productive workers was just a smokescreen so they could argue for more H1B workers. Meanwhile dozens of contractors were shown the door while the ex-Xerox salesman who got a friend to make him project manager then promptly declared backups for the mission-critical database to be an unnecessary waste of resources got to pick which 80% were laid off, then collected his bonus for reducing labor expenses.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
...wherever they come from. The problem we all face, including MS, isn't that there aren't enough software engineers, it's that there aren't enough great ones.
If the distribution of engineering talent weren't so depressingly normal (i.e. zillions of pretty good people around, far fewer great ones) and the spread of talent distribution so wide (great ones 10-100X more productive than pretty good ones) then this might make less sense.
Presumably engineering staff working and living in the US (Redmond or elsewhere) will do better financially than their counterparts in India, VietNam etc.
I need more CHEAP meat for my money making machine. Something which a lot of other industries seem to have achieved in the US of A. You people have one of the most working hours per week and least amount of vacation days in the world. Crap social security. Companies with a lot of power over workers etc.
Why would that be you think?
I suggest you make it illegal for politicians to receive money in your country. You know, as a start. Otherwise you shouldn't be surprised to be handled like cattle.
But this is just my opinion.
- -- Truth addict for life.
IT companies have been bleeding workers for the last five years. During that time, new college graduates have also been unable to find entry level work. There are excellent workers in both of those groups.
This has nothing to do with finding the best employees and everything to do with finding the cheapest employees.
SF = big city = high cost of living + California = even higher cost of living. If you were making 38k in a more rural area, you could live quite comfortably.
Last I heard the average salary starting out for coders in the US is $51k. I don't know where you got that $90k figure, but if you can remember let me know so I can tell my boss.
Question everything
Legally H1Bs MUST be paid the prevailing wage.
The only real effect that rule can have is to slow down the rate of salary decreases, not stop it. H1Bs can always be hired for the lower-end of the prevailing scale (for justifiable reasons, such as that their worse English skills make them less productive employees).
Then next year, the prevailing wage has gone down because it now includes all those H1Bs (and local workers competing with them). Over enough time, you reach the same point as if the rule had never existed at all.
it's a sign that you're not paying enough. If you really need them, your client needs them, and they'll have to pay. In the end the money will come out of some rich bastards pocket (your boss). We've got plenty of resources in this country, both people and goods. What we don't have is a second world economy where the poor are played against each other to enthrone a few lucky capital kings. But attitudes like yours will get us there.
What disgusts me about your company is this: You complain about not getting engineers you want, but you aren't willing to pay them what they're worth. It takes years to get the skills you want and constant effort to maintain them. Typical to HR, all you think about is the 40/week the tech puts in, not the other 40/week he's spending keeping his skills up to day. You people have road too far too long on the good graces of 'geeks' who haven't considered that extra job 'work'. People who thought it was fun designing a network topology. Now, there's so much competition for labor that there's not enough uber geeks doing it for love, and you're having to pay up for the expertise you want. To be honest, your companies standards are probably artificially high to create exactly the situation that makes it possible to let more cheap foreign labor in. This isn't some nutball conspiracy either. It's a known fact that during the 90's reports were forged to justify the rapidly increasing the H-1B Visa program.
Put another way, why should you expect to pay less for someone who maintains your most critical IT infrastructure, then for someone maintaining your most critical legal structure? Or Accounting Systems? If you can find competent Lawyers and Accountants, what makes you think you can't find competent Engineers?
Sorry to be so blunt, but that's the reality of it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Let's see. The company I worked for in the mid-90's has since folded. The company I worked for in the late 90's folded a few months after I bailed in 1999. The huge, theoretically safe $BIG_PHARMA company I worked for laid off my entire department, lock, stock and IT department. The company I'm working for now desperately needs more people but they're afraid to hire anyone because financing is iffy.
Of the men and women I've worked with in the past 20 years, the one still in CS are the ones who learned to jump from one speciality to another - which means I've done everything from middleware to SMTP agents to device drivers - which makes it really hard to convince an HR person that not having 8 years in Visual C++ isn't a problem.
Yeah, I can see where you'd think there were lots of CS positions going unfilled due to lack of qualified applicants.
Clear, Dark Skies
It is more than saving money. Gates seems to want to be surrounded by folks over whom he has a lot of control. An H-1b worker can be sent home any time their employer feels like it.
It's his job to make money for Microsoft. The dot-com boom earned some low quality workers large salaries because they were (or seemed) computer savvy.
:(
I do feel bad for the talented and/or hardworking ones who got taken for ride after ride with startups...
But face it, there are foreign workers willing to work harder for less money; tech workers in the US are generally spoiled IMO (with many exceptions)... In '89 you could be virtually ensured $50k/yr with a MSCE.
The market's adjusting, and foreign labor is generally cheaper now.
I say let the genuinely talented or hard working into the US and give 'em a green card. I think it would make our country a better place (though defining 'talented or hardworking' would be tough).
(I don't limit the above opinion to tech workers... construction, engineering, professor, janitor, cabbie, whatever).
The US immigrant policies have really bad problems; politicians get votes if they're 'tough on immigrants'... they get $ if they're 'ignoring the illegal immigrant problem.'
It's a two faced, dishonest system at the moment... immigrants can get in and when their visa expires noone looks for them... if they get pulled over for speeding (after paying 10 years of social security and other taxes), they're deported without a chance to return.
Businesses are pushing for cheap labor, and citizens are generally pushing for less competition for jobs... the immigrants get caught in the middle
In a technical field it is very easy to reject candidates in a phone screen interval - total lack of knowledge, unwillingness to solve problems, lack of interest in the job, all these things can kill you within 45-60 minutes.
I think a technical quiz phone screen is a total B.S. way to determine the potential value of an employee. You are attempting to quiz somebody on formulaic stuff most of which can be found in 5-10 minutes online anyway. The real value of an employee comes from skills that cannot be demonstrated in 30 minutes, but rather how they handle complex issues like influencing the attitudes of their coworkers, solving issues that are complex blend of personal relationships and technical problem, whether they have a good sense of when a problem can be solved vs. when it should be left alone.
Quizing people on off the cuff regurgitated technotrivia on the phone is unfortunately easier that really understanding what kind of employee they will be, so it is the path people tend to take. But it isn't the way you get the best employee. It's how you get somebody with a the ability to sound knowledgable on the phone.
You got trolled.
Why're you unemployed? If you're that good, you can make a living doing consulting.
Go talk to a CPA, incorporate, and start selling your services on an hourly basis.
The parent post is correct, in that there is an intrinsic bias in treating 'skilled' 1HB workers differently then completely unskilled laborers. The parent post is also class biased, and most likely covertly racist.
Isn't it just as unfair to unskilled workers in the US to allow a flood of people who are directly competing for the same jobs? If the cost of skilled work goes down because of allowing anyone to migrate, doesn't the same thing happen to all workers, no matter what they are paid?
For example, if we had a policy that limited unskilled workers, the cost of food would increase because the cost of farm labor would go up. People who have a legal place in the society could demand and get higher wages, since they could form unions. Of course this would lead to more people becoming Democrats, and the ruling Republican junta would be forced out of power.
Yes, I used a word that implies that the US is ruled by a self-serving, thieving, power mad clique that perpetuates its illegal rule by illegal means. It is just possible that the proposed change in policy being discussed here is an example of how this corrupt process works. Gates donates to the Republican, party and he gets something that benefits him at the expense of tens of thousands of other citizens. All in the name of "competitiveness". Meanwhile, he gets richer because everyone else gets poorer. Its called class warfare, and the rich are winning.
Bill Gates and George Bush are perfectly happy for you to be sleeping in a cardboard box if it gives one of their rich cronies an extra $100 a year. Wake up, or you will be lucky to be eating canned dog food. The unlucky will be eating out of garbage cans...
Mod the parent up. So many people and companies say they want smarts but what they really want is a narrowly defined skill set.
To Mr. Gates: there are plenty of smart people out there. They may not have the exact skill set you're looking for so spend some of that cash M$ is hoarding and train them.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
You should have followed the job to Mexico City. I took a job voluntarily here, including a pretty big pay cut, and have never been happier.
You're a suburbanite.
STL lists don't support operator[].
In other words, you don't really know the subjects you're evaluating people on, do you?
Interesting scenario. However, the rupee is going up while the dollar continues to decline. Once China stops pegging the value of its currency to the dollar, the yuan will go up while the dollar will decline further.
My point? Even if foreign companies get good enough to compete with US companies, they won't be able to compete on cost as the dollar declines and comes into equilibrium with their currencies.
If you create artificially high supply of workers by enticing foreigners here, then less domestic students will enter computer science courses. Eventually, those foreigners aren't going to want to come here because they'll be able to make just as much money in their own country. Then we'll be double-screwed because we won't be able to get foreign or domestic workers.
H1B visas should be drastically cut with an onerous method of getting someone approved for a H1B position.
The current method of providing a 1/2 page job advertisement with impossible skill requirments just to qualify an already know offshore worker is unethical and should be made illegal.
Those job ads are easy to spot since they are much larger than other ads and they have 2 or 5 impossible skills only a few hundred people have.
As almost anyone in the software development field can tell you, there is no shortage of software developers.
I have a good job as an SDE, and my experience is the opposite. My team has been understaffed for months, and we've been aggressively trying to hire people. Very few make it past the phone screen. Half of candidates we phone screen cannot give a convincing answer to "what is the different between a linked list and an array?"
Just hop on over to your favorite job site, and take a peek. "Candidate must have a BS in Computer Science, and 20 years of experience in the following technologies: C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, Fortran...
Let me quote my office mate who was phone screening a candidate the other day. "We're not too concerned that you know the exact languages we use, we believe that smart people can pick up our technologies without too much trouble."
I've got sympathy for you if you're out of work. But from where I'm sitting, the software developer shortage is real.
You are right that he onlywants to save money, though. He can get guest workers on visas to work for minimum wage and no benefits, the robber baron! There is no shortage of American high-tech workers. We just want to be paid a fair share for what we create, not be exploited like slaves.
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
If foreign labor is cheaper then they should hire foreign executives, say I bet an Indian can be found that will take Bill's or Steve's job for less than a tenth even a hundredth of their incomes.
The US immigrant policies have really bad problems; politicians get votes if they're 'tough on immigrants'... they get $ if they're 'ignoring the illegal immigrant problem.'
As for immigrant policies and whether to allow immigration or not, I have one question, and depending on the answer to it maybe another, to ask anyone against legal or "illegal" immigration:
1. What American Indian Tribe are you a member of?
If the answer is none, then,
2. What American India tribe signed your, or the ancestor of your's who immigrated here, papers?
Personally I believe in open borders, that a person should be able to work and live wherever they want as long as they don't violate someone else's rights and they can afford it. Actually I don't, as I don't believe in borders which are nothing more than imaginary lines drawn on paper.
FalconShould there be a Law?
By maintaining caps on visas, we encourage outsourcing. Here's a logical-extreme thought experiment: we remove all limits on immigration, and every engineer in the world decides to move to the U.S. As a result outsourcing ceases because there are no engineers outside the U.S. to outsource work to.
TFA says "Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for skilled professionals [to] ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers." But the economics don't work that way: by capping visas, they move jobs overseas. I'm cynical enough to believe that was the real intent, since the corporate owners of our politicians want to preserve a healthy outsourcing market.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
... I can tell you that there are a ton of H1's who get brought into the country, not because employers can't find talent, but because they're willing to cut every corner necessary. I've seen cases where a firm will stick 5 to 6 of them in a single apartment for the duration of their contract. They take it because it's their way out of a bad situation, and I can't fault them, although it sucks for the US born worker.
There are quite a few H1-B shops (a bunch of them in Edison, NJ particularly) which bring underskilled workers over from India and Africa in droves and stick them on projects to hope that they'll pick their skills up quick enough to perform adequately on their projects before they're fired. Then, once they get a few of these projects under their belts, they can charge just as much as US citizens because they have the experience that college grads who were born here lack.
It used to be that an employee would be brought in at the entry level and allowed to learn and apply the tools of his trade. Nowadays, that seems to be primarily the domain of the immigrant worker.
I spoke recently to a local employer about an entry level position. They wanted a college grad DBA with Visual Basic, Linux, PHP, MySQL, SQL Server, and C++ experience. They were offering a entry rate of $2100 a month and wondering why they had such a hard time filling a position. When I told him to look at what he was looking to pay, he seemed genuinely offended. I'm sure the position will stay open until the next wave of H1s can come through.
Why shouldn't engineers from around the world have an equal chance to compete?
I say let anyone live and work anywhere in the world, and most slashdot commenters should be ashamed.
Nowhere does he mention wanting cheaper labor. H1B workers are not cheaper. He does mention that he wants qualified labor. Which would better allow his company to fix major security defects in their less-than-current products.
A lot of people posting here need a reality check.
I'll be blunt: If you are in the industry and don't have a job right now, you either suck, interview poorly, or are trying for positions you aren't qualified for. The industry is hot right now and there are loads of great opportunities.
Too many people came out of the late-90's with inflated egos...
There's more to this than just the economic analysis (and whatever anecdotal evidence you may have with your given company or companies). As a general rule, bad things happen to nations that fail to look within for the resources they need to perpetuate (though I'd rather not push the energy resources aspect of this at the moment). In particular, a move to abdicate the proper development and subsequent use of intellectual talent has an instant demoralizing and chilling effect on the future population, which one way or another will work itself into the culture of that generation. A powerful message that the men in charge would rather get somebody else to do the job than own up to their responsibility of making it unnecessary.
You're looking elsewhere for people who, ultimately, retain loyalty to their nation of origin (with the exception of those who're seeking asylum, or some other pretty unusual circumstance). When it comes down to it, they may respect and admire the characteristics of the nation that employs them, but if it became feasible to set up shop back home at a reasonable quality of life, national pride dictates they'd probably take it. If the benefactor pushed strongly for this kind of importing of brainpower, then they may inadvertantly find themselves creating a significant foundation for such a large scale transition. So while it may work out just great for the export nation (at the cost of spending a generation of its own talent beyond borders), it eventually leaves the import nation with a vacuum that can't be easily filled.
Heck, the Roman empire's sole strength was its military (let's admit that it had few other redeeming qualities), and at the end of its effective lifespan it was relying on foreign mercenaries. I'm sure it seemed like a great cost-benefit proposal to the powers that be, probably because there weren't enough of them considering the subtle and/or long term ramifications. It wasn't really even that this strategy wasn't effective in the near term; it was that the citizenry just stopped caring about or respecting the premises of the nation's eminence. That's something that can't be bought and sold so easily.
FORTH is a threaded-interpreted language. Note the "ed". Check out Chuck Moore's web site if you don't believe me. I guess the questions really were impossible - especially since you were talking gibberish that even you obviously don't understand. And you're interviewing people. Sheesh.
That is all.
Now, I'm rather cynical here; I believe that we are a country made of immigrants, and it would be very hypocritical of me to demand a closed door policy. Sadly, others are not so 'open' in their thoughts, even though few Americans have more than a handful of generations behind them. I'm 4th Gen, myself. How about you, reader?
Ahh, much the way I feel. There's a question I like to ask those who are against immigration, "legal" or "illegal" which usually leads to another one.
1. What Native American Indian tribe are you a member of?
Most of the tyme it's "none", it so then I ask,
2. What NDN tribe signed your, or the ancestor of your's who immigrated here, papers?
Forget open borders, remove all borders.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I agree, soundbite culture will not allow you to use the figure that most closely represents reality. You have to face the fact that most of the media is in a ratings arms race as to who can tell the most evil story. The median is far more representative of most peoples experience, its just far more exciting to talk about the average which represents no one but leaves everyone feeling dissatisfied with their lot in life.
On the other hand you could ask why 5% of the population is paying itself millions of dollars and creating this false average value. But that would be "communism" and that is as we all know a bad thing.
I say that whatever king Bill says is law, its for the econonmy stupid, for freedom and free trade. All you whining middle class workers just have to face economic reality - you are worth nothing. What the economy needs is cheap labour from abroard and if King Bill cant have it then all of your jobs will have to be outsourced to India - thats the real agenda here.
In a way he has a point, if his business wants to compete and remain the most profitable software company in the world then he has to use the cheapest workforce he can find. Sadly that means that the US i.t. worker can look forward to a future of declining saleries and job opportunities. As people often point out the US economy is the most sucessful in the world and has achieved this status by lightly regulated raw capitalism.
Its time that IT workers retrained as telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and middle management executives (burger flippers). After all thats what happened to the steel workers, ship builders, coal miners, semiconductor fab workers, Car workers, metal workers, electronics assemblers.
Whats so special about your job that it cant be exported to the third world like all the others?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I was interviewing one guy, and asked if he knows Lisp. He didn't. So I handed him a short bit of Lisp code and asked him to make a particular change. I wasn't interested in if he did it right (he didn't), but rather how he handled the situation (very well). I've been working side-by-side with him for years now, and am very happy to do so. Next time I'm interviewing a programmer, I'll do the same thing.
But even there, some basic technical questions can be good for a quick bit of preliminary screening. Consider this: my old roommate was interviewing for a Unix sysadmin. He had applicants with "X years of Unix experience" on their resume, but couldn't tell him what ls does. Sure, phone screening won't catch everybody who doesn't meet the basic qualifications. It won't even catch half of them. It certainly won't tell you who the diamond in the rough is. But it's a quick way to weed out some people who are blatanly unsuited for the job, without the time and expense of an interview.
Maybe the guy could have learned Unix well. But he said he already had, and clearly hadn't. Would you want him as your sysadmin? What about when he tells you, "yes, I've automated backups"? Could you believe it? Would you know to assign him tasks that let him self-train, or would you just throw him at the server like an experienced sysadmin?
You're going to end up competing with workers from all over the world no matter what. You can't wish away free market economics just because they're inconvenient.
The only question is, do you want to compete with foreign workers inside the US, or would you prefer to compete with them in India? Surely competing with them inside the US should be a lot easier, since this is your home country...
Um, sorry, I have to disagree with you. Regardless of the rhetoric, they want code monkeys that will work for peanuts and do sleep-deprivation tricks. IBM Austin's recent reqs was for college grads, not any industry veterans that know how to create software due to something called, oh I'm searching for the word... experience. Those with your, "solid quantitative skills" are out of luck if they're past their twenties.
Go ahead, vote Republican. Enjoy the new Depression.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
People like myself who went into IT (B.S. of CS), who are caught up in an expensive, if not troubled, education system because we listened to corporations, who after creating a craze, try to 180 on it, are the people who these laws are protecting. Whether faults with education or the market, we have been left out as the bastard children of incompetent parents.
I really look forward to being one of the care takers of the previous generation; I am your future.
It's about living below your means (my biggest splurge in the past year has been a $125 printer) and NOT BUYING THINGS ON CREDIT.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Computer Science (the "science" of computation) is, at its core, mathematics. The fact that it has an instantiation in hardware or software is not particularly relevant. It is about algorithms and the analysis there-of.
That's all fine and good, but not relevant to most of the tasks employers want. You need to work with specific technology, coordinate with multiple other people, communicate with the customer (whoever specifies the requirements), perform first-level quality assurance (unit testing, et al.), design interdependent systems, and encode processes in a computer language. Computer science does not address any of these. You might, occasionally, need to analyze or design an algorithm, but that can be very rare.
What they want are software engineers. Since that's what many call their programmers, they seem to know it at some level. However, high school students still are primarily getting computer science degrees.
Fine, then let them immigrate properly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Those states can't have you deported.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you are a normal immigrant or a citizen, you don't have to worry about immediate deportation when your boss threatens to fire you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I haven't heard the word "Polymorphism" since college; took my memory banks a minute to bring the definition you wanted back to the surface.
The reason this was the case is because it was buried under 6 years of practical experience in which no one has used the word in my presence.
Sounds to me like you're throwing too much academic-ese at people. There is not one thing in that whole list that I don't deal with in some manner at least once a week, and I had read your post twice to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Free market economics is pure bullshit in this argument. Every country has a legitimate right to dictate who may or may not enter their country. People are not trade goods.
So, you say we should artifically increase the supply of workers in the US. What's the affect of that? Well, we've seen mass layoffs in the US. Now there are more people competing for fewer jobs. That's translated to lower wages as well. There are now fewer applications to computer science departments because US students actually want a job when they graduate from such a grueling program as computer science. So, there will be less US IT workers in the future, making us more dependent on those foreign sources of labor.
I prefer to see the US become stronger, not weaker.
To answer your question, I'd prefer to have the foreign workers outside the US. Right now the value of the dollar is too high since China is pegging the value of its currency to the dollar, in effect artificially propping up the value of the dollar. Luckily, the declining value of the dollar has put additional pressure on them to release that peg. We've already seen the rupee increase its value while the dollar has gone down. The value of both the yuan and the rupee will shoot past the dollar once China releases that peg. At some point, the cost of shipping work overseas will outweigh the cost of keeping work here.
That would leave the entire US market for US IT workers. Wages will go back up and students will become interested in computer science again. The US will be less dependent on foreign sources of labor and self-sufficient once again.