Your blog largely misses the mark.  You blog under the assumption that the only way to meet the needs of the IT industry is to do anything you can to find a loophole in our immigration laws.

If there is indeed a shortage of workers in the IT industry we should be focusing on educating our own workforce.  I'm sure the thousands of people in economically depressed areas of this country would love to change careers and have a chance at those jobs. 

If you read last week's InformationWeek you find that IT salaries have actually dropped over the last year.  That's right - dropped!  So how do you explain that and still claim there is a shortage?

We have a shortage of oil in this country.  The price of gas, the byproduct of oil, is rising.  That's economics 101.  The IT industry doesn't have an exemption from the laws of supply and demand.  If there is a shortage, as there was during the dot-com craze, salaries take a dramatic rise.  IT salaries are going down.   IT salaries are going down.  IT salaries are going down.

The IT workforce remains about the same size.  Salaries are going down.  There is no shortage, there is no shortage, there is no shortage.  Can you wrap your mind around that?

I get so tired of hearing "shortage" let total ignorance of the fundemental measures of our industry/profession. 

The H-1b visa is about, and it has always been about, labor arbitrage.  The purpose is to guarantee a lower cost of labor.  The statistics indicate that H-1b visa holders are paid less.  And even if the statistics are wrong and they are paid the same, the same nagging law of supply and demand apply.  More supply = less demand.  It is really that simple.

Am I the only one who gets that?  No, I think Milton Friedman got it when he called the H-1b visa a labor subsidy. 

Ann, Ann, Ann.  Please look at the very simple laws of supply and demand and then tell me there is a general shortage of IT workers.  There will always be a shortage, for some business people, of people they can exploit.  But that isn't a labor shortage.  That's a shortage of ethical business people. 

You may say there are very specific skills in IT that have a shortage.  Fine.  But the H-1b visa doesn't have a test or requirement that those specific skills are filled.  Why not focus on the O visa?  That visa is all about bringing exceptional people to our country.

Let me guess when Ann will say when she asks for a raise:

"I've churned out 200 articles about how people who understand C++ should be paid less than a truck driver.

There is a huge amount of discrimination in the journalism field.  I am a woman.  At least 50% of the others are men.  Give me a raise. 

I have a deep understanding of technology and have the ability to make it understandable to average users.  I have no clue how to write a SQL statement and could not write a simple program to read a text file to save my life.  But those skills are for geeks.  Not for technology editors who make it all understandable to the people who matter.  Like women and minorities."

It's pretty understandable why the US lags in technology.  Our population wishes to NEGOTIATE salaries; to negotiate immigration, to negotiate affirmative action.  The wrong people are being rewarded, over and over.

Economics is not a negotiation.  What matters, matters; what doesn't, doesn't.  A society that continually coddles and rewards the wrong people, that negotiates everything and competes for nothing, will ultimately fail.

Under a free immigration policy, programmers would be rich (relatively.)

If we truly wanted to compete, we'd eliminate affirmative action, educate the brightest at the best schools, and knock down the wall on our border to Mexico.  Mexicans could come inbut would get no affirmative action once here.  Similarly, as many people of ALL professions could come from the entire worldas long as they cold buy a plane ticket.

Globally, programmers are scarce.  The reason their salaries are falling in the US is because we must protect the salaries of HR people, manual laborers, and truck drivers while meanwhile passing laws that screw programmers.  It isn't globalization but rather a lack of political clout that's hurting us.

And yes, the fact that most programmers are white and Asian males doesn't help us much politically.