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Maybe the wages have been reduced to unattractive levels because we are bringing in immigrants to do those jobs at lower wages. In NYC you need a much higher level of wages to just be considered middle class. It has to do with the cost of living as well as the onerous taxes imposed by NYC as well as the state of NY.

• Each year, some 200,000 additional skilled foreign workers are admitted through a variety of existing visa programs.

• At least one million skilled nonimmigrant workers are in the United States at any one time.

There are numerous indications in the high-tech fields that there is a surplus of both domestic and potential foreign workers in the U.S. labor markets. If a firm is hiring at the bachelor’s level, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that in June 2011 there were 2,118,000 unemployed residents of the United States with bachelor’s degrees or more. There are some duds in that group, undoubtedly, but a lot of skills as well.

Another way of looking at this situation is to examine what America’s colleges and universities are doing to produce graduates in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and to compare that to the STEM workforce, as Hal Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers has done.

Salzman puts the total STEM workforce at 4.8 million. That is roughly one-third of the 15.7 million workers who hold at least one science or engineering degree.

There are a lot of skilled workers who have been lured out of the not-very-well-paid STEM occupations to work in high finance and elsewhere, and he suggests that an increase in wages would bring many back into STEM activities.

Supposing the employer — and many of them operate this way — would prefer to ignore the two million-plus unemployed graduates in the country, and ignore the 10 million or so STEM-trained people employed outside STEM occupations, and wants to hire foreign workers. Well, there are plenty of opportunities to do that through, for instance, the numerically limited aspects of the H-1B program. Of the 85,000 numerically limited slots in that program for the coming fiscal year 57,900 of them remained open on June 17, 2011, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

In addition there are numerically unlimited opportunities to hire skilled foreign labor in the L, J, O, and F-1 (with OPT) categories that are described below. In the last-named category the employer gets a bonus of as much as $10,000 for hiring a foreign graduate of an American university rather than a citizen or a green card graduate of the same university with the same skills. That may be hard to believe, but it is the case.