Comment Re:With unemployment where it is at, send them hom (Score 1) 357
No it's called supply and demand. I promise you that you'll find plenty of people doing what ever job you want if you just pay them accordingly. If we paid tech workers (or fruit pickers or teachers or whatever job you want) what we apparently pay investment bankers or CEOs or what we used to pay lawyers you'd be able to find as many as you need. People seem to want the free market but then complain when the free market responds by informing them that they need to pay more than they want to for a particular resource. The market is telling that employer that smart people capable of doing the job they want done can get better compensated in a different field. Why should we distort the market for any particular field?
Let me pick on Bill Gates who has testified before congress on this issue (partly cause it's just fun). He has said that Microsoft can't find enough people here with the skills they need. That's not true, there is a whole company here called Apple (and Google and yadda yadda yadda) that have all the skilled workers Microsoft needs. However Microsoft is unwilling to pay them enough to lure them away. That's the market at work, it's has decided that the most productive place to put it's skilled workers, *for a given wage* is a variety of companies. Microsoft's complaint isn't really that it can't find enough workers locally, it's just that it doesn't want to pay what's required to do so, and so what it wants to do is artificially increase the supply of workers by importing them so that the price on the demand curve shift lower.
Finally to answer the question originally posed. I'd make it a requirement that H1B type migrants be paid in the top 5 percentile (or pick your own high figure) for the job they are taking. That gives the employers incentive to find a worker here and the market will work out the rest.