Ian Welsh does a better job than I did articulating what I was trying to say in my earlier post on this:

H1-B visas obviously take jobs from Americans. Yes, companies must say they doesn’t, but they do. H1B workers can’t leave their employers unless they have another lined up immediately, so they do what they’re told or go home. As such, they obviously have reduced bargaining power compared to natives or landed immigrants. This drives down wages for natives, “if you won’t do it, we’ll get an immigrant to, and they’ll take the wage we’re offering.”

The left-wing argument against guest workers, and H1B visas are just tech guest workers, is that if we genuinely need workers, then they should be over here either as landed immigrants or on a visa which allows them to quit and have some reasonable time to find another employer. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of native workers.

Also, Vivek Ramaswami is spouting nonsense when he claims that America’s problem is cultural, because we venerate prom queens and jocks more than nerds. Nerds were no more popular in the 1950s through the 70s then they are today and yet America led the engineering world in those decades. The reason we’re lagging is because we’ve outsourced that work to China.

@pratik