[JimRed]

No problem, IF the business has to prove that no qualified American citizen was available to fill the job. Case by case, one at a time.

[Regulator]

How many of them were up for re-election?

How many would have been re-elected if this was publicized?

[posterchild]

This makes a US STEM education more valuable. Universities must be thrilled.

[tpmintx]

Not happy. As a STEM worker myself, as well as parent of 2 STEM students (1 @ PhD level), I prefer to see us focused on helping keep the market open to US kids, rather than imports. Imports work for way less. Accustomed to living multiple unrelated people per housing unit, accustomed to working nearly 24x7, etc. Prefer to keep the really good jobs for US citizens. But hey, what do I know, I’m not a billionaire.

[Sequoyah101]

I gave a talk at a university last night to engineering students. Mostly undergraduates. I had to look hard to find Americans.

I told the faculty advisor I would not be back, he is a foreigner too. In fact most of the faculty are not US. Just a bunch of PhDs who stayed on education visas as long as they could.

I see no reason to spend my time helping kids who are not interested in the United States for any thing but comfort and a paycheck and because their home is a cesspool.

[Theoria]

We need STEM workers, but we import more, thus increasing the numbers of STEM workers, causing STEM salaries to decrease in the market.

Or they simply fly them in. And pay them the same rates as living in India!

Bay Area tech company caught paying imported workers $1.21 per hour

'The eight employees are being paid $40,000 in owed wages; they were reportedly installing computer systems at the company's headquarters. EFI was charged $3,500 -- yes, seriously -- for being at fault.

[Resolute Conservative]

We do not need them.

[rbg81]

This is pretty outrageous. Age discrimination in IT is well known and I know several (competent) older professionals who can’t find jobs. A big reason is the flood of labor from Asia—many of whom don’t know squat, but they work cheap.

[remember]

In its eagerness to meet the wishes of the high tech industry — and steal jobs from qualified American workers — the Republican majority on the committee, with the single, commendable exception of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voted to allow as many as 55,000 green cards to be issued annually to aliens with advanced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees from American universities.

Yes, most members of Congress seem to be highly motivated by campaign contributions coming from the high tech industry and the hack studies being payrolled by them. For example, this analysis looks at the oft-repeated claim from one of these studies that "every additional 100 foreign-born workers who earned an advanced degree in the United States and then worked in STEM fields led to an additional 262 jobs for US natives". The following graph shows the data on which this claim appears to be based:

To the untrained eye, this is just two random clouds of data. But to the trained eye, this is proof that each foreign STEM worker with an advanced degree create 2.62 jobs! You can see further analysis at http://econdataus.com/amjobs.htm.