My point is that we once had a near monopoly on brains. We are pushing those brains offshore and out of employment by American companies. Yes, it seems to keep the compensation for engineers below the stratosphere but it also keeps the markets for those engineers in this country.Those brains taking their education offshore or being forced offshore after getting their degrees here will keep those salaries "depressed" just as well because the market is, indeed worldwide. Were it not most American engineers would be doing something else instead. American techies are competing with Germans and Russians and Indonesians whether they come here to work or not.
"My point is that we once had a near monopoly on brains."
Yes, but when a country has a population of 1 Billion people they can turn out alot more engineers than we can, just by sheer size. And we are up against two countries that are that size.
We can't expect to maintain some sort of near monopoly on brains by importing the cheap talent just like we import cheap goods from China. The talent pool of techies overseas is like a tidal wave, and that is just a fact (of course they got all sorts of technology for free from us because we gave it to them by outsourcing over there, so they got a huge boost just from that).
The only thing American companies need to do is find out how to be successful in the marketplace as it stands. Importing more and more techies into the US is not going to help, it will only drive more people in the US out of those careers.
The job market can handle some re-adjustment of wages, that's just normal. But when the perception among young people is that the tech sector is a lousy place to try and have a career because you will just get outsourced at some point then no one will get tech degrees anymore. No one thinks they can have a long-term career in tech sector anymore, and that is what is driving people out of studying in those fields.