“but they also can generally accept less, because they’re ultimately usually sending or bringing that money back to someplace with a lower cost of living. For those reasons, there is obviously an incentive for employers to discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of temporary foreign workers.”
Perhaps, but a company in San Francisco, where the cost of living in extremely high, can hire workers in Tupelo, Mississippi, where the cost of living is low.
Companies should have the right to buy the highest quality but cheapest labor in the marketplace.
Quality seldom enters into the equations. Cheapest does.
The question is the “marketplace”. In past days, slavery was legal. “Companies” (mostly individuals back then I suppose) had “the right to buy the highest quality but cheapest labor in the marketplace.” Part of the reason the North and the Republicans prohibited slavery in their territory and ultimately couldn’t tolerate it even in the South was that the “marketplace” for labor was artificially tilted against laborers by the fact that there was a large class of them with no bargaining power whatsoever.
We have much the same thing going on now with illegal immigration. Again, “companies” have “the right to buy the highest quality but cheapest labor in the marketplace”, but the marketplace has been artificially tilted against laborers by the fact that there is a large class of them with no bargaining power whatsoever.
Temporary foreign workers is certainly better than slavery and illegal immigration, but it’s still of a piece. They don’t have any ability to change employers, so their bargaining power is limited, so to the extent that they’re in the “marketplace”, the marketplace is artificially titled against labor.
I don’t think those of us who are concerned about these issues are asking for special protections for workers; we just want an even playing field in the marketplace for labor where there isn’t a government-sanctioned, imported class of laborers with fewer rights and thus less bargaining power than the rest.
Are you willing to compete against H1B realtors who live four to an efficiency or 1-bedroom apartment?
Fixed.