>> 4 One may reasonably conclude that engineering labor imported into
>> the US reduces compensation to engineers in the US.
Doug Henwood Thu, 3 Jul 2003 19:48:35 -0400
> It's raised the income of the immigrant engineers, hasn't it? Why
> are Americans more entitled to those incomes than, say, Indians?
US technical visa programs don't so much enrich immigrant workers as they enrich US employers.
The technical visa programs, like their agricultural predecessors, are designed to degrade (from the workers' perspective :-) conditions of labor by placing the immigrant laborer in an unnecessarily weak position relative to the employer. (Perhaps you believe that US migrant labor policies have been designed solely to allow the workers of the world to share in US prosperity ?-) See
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
especially sections 2 and 9.
The resulting indentured servitude reduces per-capita earnings more that would the supply effect alone.