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The salary they artificially created to cut their margins is up 64% in the last 16 years.

Hmm....really?

Maybe a little more depth is needed in your understanding of economics...

Sociologist Lisa Catanzarite looked at many different occupations across 38 major metropolitan areas. She found that the higher the percentage of "recent immigrant Latino men" [RILM] in each local job, the lower the wages paid to citizens and established immigrants.

She writes:
"The pay penalty in occupation-MAs [Metropolitan Areas] with 25% RILM [recent immigrant Latino men] amounts to $2,369 per year; at 15% RILM, the penalty is $1,421, and at 5% RILM, $474. These are substantial wage discounts, given that annual earnings average $21,590. In other words, in occupations with 25% RILM, workers earn only 89% as much as workers in comparable fields without RILM."

In other words: all else being equal, if the makeup of your occupation's local labor pool changes from 0% new immigrant to 25%, your income shrinks 11%. (source...http://www.ncpa.org/iss/imm/2003/pd081903c.html and http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/)

And that only accounts for the unskilled Labor market...the % difference is GREATER in the "Skilled" Labor segment. And don't deny it, because the demands for H-1B's PROVES it's more profitable for Companies to follow this business model that GUTS the American Middle Class!

You sound like a cheap cloth salesman..."never mind the quality...feel the width!"

So stuff your cheap Karl Marx allusions...free markets economies are not free if the PLAYING FIELD is not level, and the game is rigged!

What playing field? What level? What rigged? I simply pointed out that wages are up 64% in the last 16 years. If companies could pick whatever wage level they wanted to exploit their workers in good Marxist fashion, do you think the level they'd pick would gallop ahead 64% in 16 years? Why?

Real economics understands that wage levels are set by the marginal productivity of labor, not by imaginary conspiracies of exploiters. Wages have risen in the last 16 years - just as they have risen in the last 160 years, since Marx - because what labor is able to do is worth more dollars than it was worth before.

Rising wages over every historical time scale you care to name are a proof that no conspiratorial undersetting of wages is going on because it is not in the alleged interests of the alleged conspirators, yet it relentlessly happens. Proving they are not in control of wages. They also prove that Malthusian arguments about imaginary "races to the bottom" and "iron law of wages" talk is simply (though honestly enough) flat wrong.

Wages rise because work accomplishes more, and those doing the accomplishing, precisely because there is competition *for* them as well as among them, capture the vast majority of those increased accomplishments for themselves.