Everybody here is assuming an experienced worker that can't find a job willing to pay what he expects to make and is pissed at companies hiring foreigners is somehow undoubtedly a great engineer being pushed away by a "bean counter" driven job market. Yet the people landing the jobs "can't find their asses" and will somehow doom the company hiring them.
In my experience, great professionals can come from anywhere.
Any company willing to hire based on cost of labor rather than skills (which along with enthusiasm should translate roughly into return on that cost) will get exactly that, cheap labor without any assurance of quality.
I've seen great programmers, product, project management and design professionals from abroad that can deal with all of the complexities associated with a technological product with skills comparable to the best in their fields.
So, my recommendation is: don't worry about cheap labor, if you are skilled and enthusiastic about work, you'll become indispensable in your job. If you are skilled and easy to work with, people will hire you on the spot. If a potential employer is more interested in monetary cost rather than quality of the work you can output, you probably don't want to work for them.
Disclosure: I work in the US on an L-1 Visa, I'm from Argentina and I have the pleasure to work with great local professionals as well as very unskilled ones, the same goes for my coworkers abroad, I just don't find any consistency on either side.
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Everybody here is assuming an experienced worker that can't find a job willing to pay what he expects to make and is pissed at companies hiring foreigners is somehow undoubtedly a great engineer being pushed away by a "bean counter" driven job market. Yet the people landing the jobs "can't find their asses" and will somehow doom the company hiring them.
In my experience, great professionals can come from anywhere.
Any company willing to hire based on cost of labor rather than skills (which along with enthusiasm should translate roughly into return on that cost) will get exactly that, cheap labor without any assurance of quality.
I've seen great programmers, product, project management and design professionals from abroad that can deal with all of the complexities associated with a technological product with skills comparable to the best in their fields.
So, my recommendation is: don't worry about cheap labor, if you are skilled and enthusiastic about work, you'll become indispensable in your job. If you are skilled and easy to work with, people will hire you on the spot. If a potential employer is more interested in monetary cost rather than quality of the work you can output, you probably don't want to work for them.
Disclosure: I work in the US on an L-1 Visa, I'm from Argentina and I have the pleasure to work with great local professionals as well as very unskilled ones, the same goes for my coworkers abroad, I just don't find any consistency on either side.