None of this changes your point, but to add to it: - they can leave change professions and apply to law, medical, dental, or nursing school. - they can save u

None of this changes your point, but to add to it: - they can leave change professions and apply to law, medical, dental, or nursing school. - they can save up, quit their job, and travel around the country, try to write a novel, paint, play music, or become a surf bum. - they can leave the tech industry and open their own flower, hot dog, crepe stand, film production company, or record label. - I've heard there are other things free people also do (that Silicon Valley employers consider less valuable than writing code in a giant open office at a wage the employers have decided is "fair"), but I forget them all right now. In short, they can do any of those things that people who are allowed to participate in free labor markets are allowed to do. Silicon Valley asked the labor market what it would take to get highly competent and intelligent people with freedom to become developers in the valley rather than doing any of those things you or I mentioned above, and the market answered. Silicon Valley didn't like the answer, so they had the government ask again for them. The government responded by creating a shadow immigration system under which high tech employers control the circumstances under which would-be immigrants are allowed to come to the US and the conditions under which they would be allowed to remain. That they would defend this as "skilled immigration", or think there is any pro-immigrant or libertarian argument for it, is bewildering to me. It's hardly the most egregious installment in the US's grim history of allowing employers to control a workers right to be in the US, but it's still a shame we haven't learned that workers (who we might want to refer to as "people") should have the freedom to chose who they will marry, where they will work, and what they will do, in response to their own interests and market signals.