H1Bs lower the wage of American tech workers because it fills the workforce with those who can't ask for more.
Cracking down on illegal immigrants just forces them underground away from the ability to demand workers rights. This puts the American worker, who demands minimum wage, safe work places and overtime at a disadvantage.
I don't claim to know what the perfect policy is but as it stands the systems are set up to benefit the employer in every case.
Giving employers a way to shackle workers to a specific job and salary is bad from virtually every political perspective. It's anti-competitive (what kind of free market association is that?), it's anti-immigrant (obviously), and it's anti-labor because it artificially drops market prices.
Like show up at the airport and get a green card?
"New arrivals were processed quickly. In the Registry Room, Public Health Service doctors looked to see if any of them wheezed, coughed, shuffled or limped. Children were asked their names to make sure they weren't deaf or dumb. Toddlers were taken from their mothers' arms and made to walk. As the line moved forward, doctors had only a few seconds to check each immigrant for sixty symptoms of disease. Of primary concern were cholera, favus (scalp and nail fungus), tuberculosis, insanity, epilepsy, and mental impairments. The disease most feared was trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that could lead to blindness and death.
Hospital Wards Once registered, immigrants were free to enter the New World and start their new lives. But if they were sick, they spent days, weeks, months even, in a warren of rooms. Some, like the tuberculosis ward, were open to the sea, where a gentle New York harbor breeze cleansed their lungs, improving their chances. Other rooms were solitary, forlorn places where the illness itself decided when to leave or stay. Most patients in the hospital or Contagious Disease Ward recovered, but some were not so lucky. More than 120,000 immigrants were sent back to their countries of origin, and during the island's half-century of operation more than 3,500 immigrants died there."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/peopleevents/e_ellis.ht...
And that's not even covering even less-friendly actions, like the Chinese Exclusion Act.
That doesn't sound like a lot, given the scale of immigration. Out of how many? This sounds like a good way to flood the labor market.
If anyone could come into the US by simply passing a physical exam, salaries would be impacted much more drastically, this time by the sheer increase in the labor supply.
We adjusted and the economy grew.
Concerns like yours were the same concerns raised by Americans regarding Asians a little over a century ago, leading to our closed borders. These fears were unfounded.
America is still succeeding based on the momentum of our former liberal open border policy and in another century or so I'm sure we'll regret having tightened immigration as much as we have.
It's crazy that if you're born here by random chance you get incredible perks in life, but if you want to come here and earn those perks you're pretty much screwed unless you've already proven success in your current country.
We just systematically deprived those workers of their rights while they built stuff, worked in meat packing plants, restaurants, etc. Meanwhile the urban poor deal with 50%+ unemployment rates.
I don't have a problem with immigration -- my grandparents were all immigrants. I have a problem with this three-tier system of greencards, guest visas and systematic import of undocumented workers.
These leech companies are farming exploited quasi-immigrant labor while screwing up the labor market for everyone else.
You should be able to come to this country like my ancestors did -- pass a physical and get a green card. An Indian technology worker shouldn't be separated from his kids, a Chinese restaurant waiter shouldn't be an indentured slave, and Americans of all backgrounds shouldn't have their salaries kneecapped by thousands of workers with no rights.