The two reasons you give do not hold up. First, expats in the US will be buying goods and services from Low-Paid American workers. Also, they will send a large portion of their discretionary income back to their families in the home country. Secondly, (although you use the example of Canada), most of these Visas are granted to nationals in the Far East. You state that "once the regulatory environment becomes zero-sum in such a manner, citizens of both countries gain the ability to seek out the most efficient employment, " I would suggest that that is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

We should be very conservative with our H-1B Visas. Every one of these visas issued amounts to one less job for a US citizen, and usually a good paying job, at that. If there are not enough citizens with the needed skills, then companies themselves can hire-to-train. It is called hiring "entry-level".

Hi Mr. Harrington, Do you have any idea where the "No-Fly List" comes from?

I am thinking of going to Mint linux rather than suffer the Unity desktop. Mint Debian is particularly interesting as a substitute for Ubuntu.

I too did not like Unity. It took me a while to figure out how to open a terminal session. I did not like the fact that I had to create an icon for the launcher. The Ubuntu Classic interface is now my interface of choice. Thomas Twinnings