But presumably companies are refusing to train their own workers.
Small business owner here. High tech startup we employ 24 people, all have degrees and most have years of experience.
We hire some new graduates, coop students in production and testing and are training them but what I need are PhD maths/physics/CS people, I can't take a high school student and "train" them to PhD level.
And presumably they won't pay the really high wages that would tempt the actual qualified workers to relocate, etc.
We are a startup, we have $2M in VC funding - its difficult to outbid Google/Amazon/Apple/Hootsuite, nevermind Wall St.
Instead, there seems increasing political pressure to import green card workers from other countries who might have these skills. Is this cheaper? I guess it must be.
Not cheaper - necessary.
I find a research paper by a group at Cambridge, ETH, Technion - I don't say, "well I'm not going to use that idea because it's not American".
But I can't hire the researcher to come and turn it into a product. All I can do is pray that they don't find a European/Isreali/Russian investor and start a competitor
I added up the people that work for us. We have one "native" and they are first generation HK-Chinese. The rest are Brits, Israeli, Korean, Indian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Chilean, Russian, even an Iraqi. But they were all already living here, I can't hire a foreign one.
Yes H1B is a scam, I have been on both sides of it. Yes it is almost entirely used by large body shops to bring in cheap offshore developers to do crud work to keep costs down - but that is because of the limits on H1B (sponsors, quotas, limited ability to change jobs etc).
Allowing people with STEM graduate degrees to move to your country and work is not going to put the "average" American out of work.