Eh, matters arn't as simple as portrayed - a good bit of U.S. application support/development has went overseas to India... ...within a short 15 minute drive of

Eh, matters arn't as simple as portrayed - a good bit of U.S. application support/development has went overseas to India... ...within a short 15 minute drive of my home in Arizona, I can tally thousands of programming jobs (mostly old school COBOL + CICS type work, but not limited to, as tons of Java and web developer slots too were affected) that went overseas. Departments comprised of 200+ employees (plus additional U.S. contracted programmers) now are skeleton crews that manage a blend of offshore and non-immigrant Visa workers that work at company facilities on-site or in special facilities here in U.S.. But in 5+ years time, the Indian programmers become the system subject matter experts as the few remaining U.S. workers mark the days until retirement. There are few young U.S. workers waiting in the wings, and any American who has opted for a career in programming has chosen something more "sexier", like working with Rails or as a web developer, even if the pay is a fraction of what a developer could make 15-20 years ago working with such "old school" mainframe technology... But those systems are still running, every time you use a credit card, book a flight, use electricity, etc..., the "main nerve center" system that accommodates such transactions is still going to be a COBOL system with a DB2 (or even worse, an ancient hierarchical IBM IMS database)...