A lot of the comments assume that there are only two choices: hire a local American worker or hire an immigrant. But, as the article shows, there is a third cho

A lot of the comments assume that there are only two choices: hire a local American worker or hire an immigrant. But, as the article shows, there is a third choice: hire outside of the US. Giving this third choice, I don't think that restricting H1B visas in some fashion (either through cost or availability) will necessarily have the effect of increasing domestic wages. It may have the opposite effect and drive companies to open up shop outside of the US - Microsoft opened up a development shop in Canada for just this reason [1] and my understanding is that Microsoft would strongly prefer that all of its employees be in one location. The biggest risk would be that American companies start choosing non-US locations as their engineering center-of-gravities because they want to avoid the coordination costs of distributed development without losing the ability to hire non-American workers [2]. [1] http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/07/MSWord/ http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/07/MSWord/ [2] This already happens at a small scale already. I know of a SF-based startup that moved their engineering organization to Europe because they couldn't get visas for key team members.