This is one of the problems with some PhDs. It's probably not much of a problem with Bachelor's degree holders; with a BS, you learn enough to learn how to learn more later on, and you learn how little you really know, but you don't get so specialized that you think you're an expert.

What level of autodidactism are we talking about here anyway? High school dropouts, or people with slightly different degrees to what they're currently working in?

Remember, a university education is not a training course. It's supposed to give you the fundamentals so you have a broad education and a starting point to learn more on your own later. It doesn't replace specialized knowledge gained through experience, and never will. Ruby and JavaScript are not languages normally taught at the university level; those are things you're supposed to learn on your own, after learning more general concepts in a university program. Same goes for web apps; someone who earned a CS degree in 1992 is not going to have any formal training on such a thing, but they'll have learned all the general concepts behind how computers work and behind programming, algorithms, data structures, etc. which they need to learn how to program web apps on their own.

Relocation is helpful, but only to an extent. If the job is located in Bumfuck, Louisiana, how many tech people actually want to live in a place like that, even if the cost of living is cheaper and relo is compensated?

How do you propose to get power across the Strait of Gibraltar?

Morocco and Algeria aren't the most politically stable countries in the world either, and aren't far removed from the nations like Tunisia and Libya that just experienced violent uprisings. You want to make Europe's power and economy dependent on these nations? All it would take is a small terrorist attack against some transmission line towers to cause chaos and plunge parts of the continent into darkness. That seems like a rather stupid idea to me.

>You do understand that by holding these people out, you're just as well "allowing Mexicans to die in the streets", right?

What about Africans? What are you personally doing to help Africans who are starving? What about people starving in various places in Asia? How is it the US's responsibility to take care of every single indigent person in the whole world? And how would we, when there's 7.5B people on earth, and the US only has 310M? Why are the Mexicans more important than the Africans? And why isn't the Mexican government being called on to take care of their own people?

>These people aren't being forcibly captured and taken into the country: they come of their own will, they work for pay (such as they can find)

Yeah, they used to say the same thing about indentured servants. People willingly became indentured.

>and they are always free to leave.

And do what? Starve? That's not much of a choice.

>The whole point of legalizing immigration is to ensure that said labor force is not quite as cheap (since min. wage would apply and could actually be enforced),

And how does that help? Walmart pays minimum wage, and taxpayers are subsidizing them because Walmart's workers all have welfare and Medicaid. So why are you so interested in making taxpayers subsidize cheap labor for big corporations anyway?

You mean HVDC cables? They're installed all over Europe and are working fine, thanks. It would be pretty straightforward to have several of them piping solar power from the Sahara

I thought Europeans were supposed to be better at geography than Americans....

Take a look at a map. In case you didn't realize, there's a large body of water between Europe and the Sahara Desert; it's called the Mediterranean Sea. I've never heard of anyone building transmission lines over large bodies of water.

You could go around it I suppose, but aside from the even greater transmission losses from this extra distance, now you're talking about putting your critical infrastructure through countries like Syria. You don't think that's going to be a problem?

How exactly do you propose to connect giant transmission lines across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans?

The latest thing I've seen from the Koch camp (I assume that's where it's from) is some picture about wind farms killing birds, and comparing them to gas and oil, and complaining that gas and oil companies have been fined for various practices yet they don't kill any birds (I guess they forgot about all the birds caught in oil spills).

Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.

It's their attempt at a Big Lie: a lie repeated over and over until everyone believes it's true.

H1-B aren't taking me and other Gen-Xers jobs, they're taking the millennial's jobs. And the Baby Boomers who pissed & shit in the punch bowl that used to hold the American dream don't care enough to do anything about it.

It's not just that. The Millenials have mostly drunk the immigration kool-aid sold to them by their corporate and political masters, and seem to be mostly in favor of open borders, meanwhile they advocate this from their parents' basements because they can't afford to move out on their own.

This country is completely screwed, and it's pretty scary to think what it'll look like in 20 years.

So you're going to allow Mexicans do die in the streets by denying them medical care because they haven't paid enough taxes? And you're going to use them as a cheap labor force with no rights? That sounds great. I guess that's the real Democrat motive here: they want to enrich business owners by giving them a bunch of laborers they can use as indentured servants. So things really aren't that different from the 1800s, when the Democrats were the ones defending slavery.

Or, we can give them all Medicaid and welfare and other social services, and we can bankrupt ourselves because there simply isn't enough work to go around in this poor economy (esp. for unskilled people who don't speak English). We're already subsidizing Walmart by giving their workers welfare because Walmart won't pay them enough; now you want to subsidize cheap labor for more big corporations? All along, the Democrats have been saying the Republicans are the ones in the pocket of Big Business, but it seems that it's really the other way around.

That was many generations ago. How are the Mexicans going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed against the Azteks and Mayans anyway? And how are those who have some Aztek descent going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed (they were known for human sacrifice)?

Unless you're willing to go back to the beginning of human existence (~2 million years) and figure out who wronged whom, and make reparations accordingly, then shut up about this stuff. When everyone involved is dead, it's irrelevant.

Finally, when the US seized Mexican territory, there weren't any people living there except Native Americans. How is it OK for the Mexican government (run by descendents of southwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim land lived on by Native Americans, but it's not OK for the US government (run by descendents of northwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim the same land lived on by Native Americans? Why do people like you have a bigoted bias in favor of descendents of people from Spain and Portugal, and against descendents of people from Germany and Britain and France (mostly Britain)?

All of the foriegn workers I know live in insular communities with others from their region of the globe, and adamantly refuse to let go of the majority of their native culture including language and customs.

You need to spend some time around tech workers. All the Indian and Chinese tech workers I've met speak English (Indians usually much better than Chinese, granted) and work pretty well with people of all ethnicities in the workplace. They're also usually pretty open to hanging out with others.

Yes, Mexicans are totally different from this. One of the big problems I see with the immigration debate is people conflating different groups of immigrants. Some groups are very good at integrating (Indians in particular) and contributing to the economy, other groups don't integrate well at all and are a big net negative to the economy. We could use some more of the former, and we don't need any more of the latter (and honestly, we can't afford it). The difference is usually correlated to education I think, but also some other cultural factors (English is basically a second language in India because of the effects of British colonialism, for instance, and both Indian and Chinese cultures very heavily emphasize education).

I sure haven't heard much from the Dems in recent years about labor unions. They seem to just assume the unions will support them, but I've seen zero actual support of unions from the Dem politicians. Instead, it seems their #1 issue is bringing in as many low-cost workers as possible, which seems rather contrary to the goals of unions.

If you make the offer, then it's only fair if you offer it to everyone worldwide, regardless of their ability to come here on their own. That means we need to offer relocation services to everyone worldwide who wants to come here, not just those who happen to live within walking distance and on the same continent.

When this happens, several billion people are going to want to come here and get social services. How are we supposed to pay for that? Them working and paying taxes isn't enough. We already have liberals complaining that Walmart is effectively getting subsidized workers because their employees are all making minimum wage and are on welfare and food stamps. So they're costing society more than they're chipping in. How is that going to work when you add tens of millions more, or several billion more?