This shows that you have no experience in the IT sector. I have watched as project managers have deliberately hired unqualified people with the thinking that they can be trained. The main requirements being cost and willingness to pound on the keyboard to get the job done. Of course, this takes for granted that all people are equal with the only difference being experience and training. In IT, I have found that not to be the case. The result of this hiring practice is normally very long production times and sub par projects. In the case of foreign laborer produced code, it is normally very shabby with all the corners cut wherever possible. In software, to cut a corner leads to software that doesn't work for all situations.
Many IT managers have no idea what it takes to make a project work. The vast majority of them have never done the job themselves. This leads directly to the stat you see waved around that 90% of all software projects fail. On my projects, the ones that have failed have not been due to technical reasons, but rather for business or political ones.
Of course, this whole argument presupposes the existence of open borders for labor. The idea is insane and the direct result of short sighted thinking. (Also the mantra of libertarians). With over 6 billion people on the planet, and the age of never ending mega corporation mergers, how many companies do you think there are in this world? How many positions? There are simply not enough positions for everyone on the planet. If you open up the borders for all people to compete for the jobs, then you end up with the jobs going to the most "qualified"... which has cost being the major factor in qualifying someone.
In the end, are you willing to do your job for a bowl of rice and $2/hr? That is the going rate for Chinese programmers. Your education costs alone would never allow that, yet the person you are competing with does not have to pay back their educational costs, has extremely cheap housing prices, and the goods/services in their country are very inexpensive (10:1 difference between the US and China).
Yes. By being fully qualified. That is what a sound business is going to want. Some of you are missing my point. I said the only way we can compete it to either lower our prices (since we had priced ourselves out of the market with our current skill set) or get better skills. I really don't expect us to lower our wages, what I expect is we'll use our brains to develop skills that are more cutting edge.
I should have said "fully-qualified worker". I have worked with a number of H1-B visa workers who are highly qualified. The fact is, there is nothing inherently superior about the American worker. We have a slight advantage when it comes to communicating in English and in interfacing with American customers. But for many jobs, such as IT jobs, this is not a requirement. So, to rephrase my question, could you compete against a fully-qualified worker whose cost of living is one quarter of yours?
On the other hand, our economy and general business environment may be superior to most countries. Hence, we are providing a benefit to many foreign workers by providing them with jobs that their own economies cannot yet provide. And I suspect that those jobs will serve as a foundation for competing companies to be started in those countries. Of course, I doubt that any of our policies are designed to purposely help those countries. As is to often the case, they are geared for the short-term benefit of our most influential companies. What they should be geared for is the long-term benefit of all of our citizens.