Nobody made any claim of the sort! In fact, I made the opposite: when they enter into a labor market with local considerations (cost of labor, community investments) they should be treated as an equal. Right now, they are not. And one of the primary ways they are not is by being employer-constrained. That's the main issue I take umbrage with! Bring as many over as we want, but let them exist in the labor pool.
> To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
These are not artificial factors for any of the players involved. May we be better off without them? Probably so, in the long-run. But they do exist today. Maybe in a computer simulation they can be treated as such, but right now those "artificial factors" have exceptionally real consequences in the world we live in. While national boundaries may be an "artificial factor", cost of living is not, nor is added cost of labor due to social commitments at the national level. Nor are dozens of other things.
Should we try to prevent companies from legally hiring local workers with non-compete clauses in their contracts? I think so. And I think it's a bigger issue than immigrants from the point of view of artificial wage distortion. Yet somehow these threads about immigrant workers get a lot more enthusiasm than threads about non-compete, so there's obviously something else to it. And I can't see what else besides the GP's "I'm an American".
Of course we should!
There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer, unless we deny ourselves the benefits of the work done by the latter. To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.