We all saw through the Great Recession that immigration rises and falls with the economy.
I don't care about the economy as much as I care about my employment. I've directly witnessed the negative effects on American tech employees as a direct result of the rise in off-shoring and H1-B visas.
As an example, virtually everyone on this site should be able to walk into a Java shop and be employed there within a few hours. After all, this is a high-demand technology used by huge corporations. Yet we see people commenting even here about being unable to even get an interview after months of mass-applying.
Also, the US is nothing like the USSR. The US is where you make the most money. There won't be any brain drain from the US.
My point is that if not for extra-competitive market, there would be no companies for you to be employed at, because they would fail international competition. California especially hates any non-compete clauses, which is bad for a particular company, but good for the whole market.
I used to live in a country with high tariffs on imports and bad immigration policies. While sounding good as you describe on paper, the quality keeps dropping, productivity stagnates, and in pretty much every area anything imported means "better". So no one wants to buy local anymore. And it doesn't make sense to export anymore, as outsiders don't have tariffs.
There would be no java shops to walk into. Why create them in low-performance high-wages country if there is now a good amount of highly-educated Java professionals in, say, Lagos, Nigeria?
I don't care about the economy as much as I care about my employment. I've directly witnessed the negative effects on American tech employees as a direct result of the rise in off-shoring and H1-B visas.
As an example, virtually everyone on this site should be able to walk into a Java shop and be employed there within a few hours. After all, this is a high-demand technology used by huge corporations. Yet we see people commenting even here about being unable to even get an interview after months of mass-applying.
Also, the US is nothing like the USSR. The US is where you make the most money. There won't be any brain drain from the US.