Not going to bother defending our education system since so many foreigners are trying to get into our colleges, I’d say we’re fine. Also, the skills gap is a myth: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...
Still lots of other issues I pointed out.
Also, India uses human resource as a balance in trade. They allow US companies to sell stuff in India in luie of them highering indians abroad (which send a part of the salary back home to their family) or in India. If US applies an America first policy in everything then India has no incentive to allow these companies into India. Software companies are not creating super critical things which can't be replicated, specially by indians who are already working for Google, Facebook, etc who will lose their jobs.
EDIT : Currently there are no tariffs on Tech companies. What are people even arguing ?
Barely. Have you seen Indian tariffs?
Tangent: I feel like those on work visas in the comments here are already outside of the norm that I receive resumes for and I honestly feel for their situation, hope they can stay so long as they choose to, and are paid fairly. Everyone deserves to be treated as equal humans and I feel like this is forgotten all too often.
The United States education system, while it does fail regularly, has taught most educated persons to question and be creative, yet also deliver quality. This is super desirable in this field.
I’ve reviewed a few hundred resumes, and at least a hundred on-site interviews, and I’m still trying to hold out hope for the h1b system yet am continually disappointed at the quality of candidates I’m being fed by the “approved” contract houses at the absurdly ridiculous company I work for. Faked resumes are the norm, as well as listing the fact that a dev has “Implemented UI Table View” as an Android candidate or the equivalent opposite for iOS candidates. (50% of the team I’ve hired are on work visas currently. The one contract house in question occasionally has a dev.)
The contract houses almost wholly refuse to source local talent. At first I thought it was a fluke. From one contract house - I’ve only ever been given two local devs and every other dev has been h1b. I get complaints that our hiring process is too strict because the dev can’t build a rest client app in an hour and a half, or write a method that parses a string and returns a double and an int.
Meanwhile, there are local devs I went to school with, and know of their skill level, who are looking for work.
I don’t think the education system has failed in this case - I think contractor culture of corps and contract house greed has failed us all. Also, the requirements of bachelor’s or master’s degrees has exacerbated the problem with the ridiculous cost of those degrees depending on the US schools chosen. If companies want to profit off local talent, then open up dev shops in other countries. China is the only country that’s potentially prohibitive of this practice depending on your business.
Also, which fields are you mentioning that require foreign “specialist” work that can’t pay these wages? They could apparently pay those wages in 1989. This program was setup to supply the US with skilled workers it urgently needed paying them an equivalent minimum of $121k in today’s money ($60k in 1989, which remains unchanged today).
Which is exactly why the largest block of H1B visas goes to the shittiest companies.
America's education system is pretty poor. It would be nothing without H1Bs. Take it from Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. Let me tell you something. America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would not be a Silicon Valley without the H1B. [...] You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. [...]"
the rest of the video is pretty good too. I recommend watching it.
> There should be a $150k-$200k minimum on bringing over specialized knowledge workers
This is stupid because you are privileging fields that can afford theses wages. Plenty of over fields which are not IT are in need of foreign experts and cannot afford to pay these salaries.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fphPeRvhjQ