[Alberta's Child]

I agree with a lot of your points, but from what I’ve seen since the early days of “Occupy Wall Street” I’d say very, very few of these young people were employable in any field where they’d be competing with H-1B visa workers. In fact, the common theme for a lot of these people is that they had useless college degrees — and carrying enormous college debts from them. None of these people were capable of working in a job that would pay them sufficiently to cover the cost of that debt.

This is one of the dirty little secrets about foreign-born workers in so many professional fields. One of the reasons they work for so much less pay than their American counterparts is that they don’t have to cover the huge cost of a U.S. college education that simply isn’t worth what was paid for it.

[central_va]

I would prefer we close out borders and let MARKET FORCES ACT TO SET WAGES instead of arbitrarily setting them and forcing them down artificially through global labor arbitrage.

[ClearCase_guy]

Good points. Especially your points about college debt.

I see this as (at least) a two layer problem:
Young people have debt but may not be terribly employable. They can be quite vocal about their need for “stuff” even if they don’t work.

Another layer would be long-time American workers who may be 40 or 50 or 60 and they are fed up with a system that just doesn’t seem to work anymore. There are a lot of early retirements out there. People are leaving corporate America and settling for much simpler jobs so that they can do more living and less careerism, because the careerism wasn’t satisfying.

I think our vision of “work” should be re-examined.