Reply #5: My area is in engineering

[exboyfil]

so I will address your points from that experience.

1. In general engineering graduate school is free (actually partially paid) by being a Research or Teaching Assistant. Lots of foreigners have these assistantships (kind of the point of my post - affirmative action in that area might be appropriate. Something like only making grants available to professors with a certain number/percentage of U.S. born engineers for example. Also lots of schools declare TAs and RAs in state students for tuition so that the departments have to pay less than they would otherwise for foreign (and out of state) students.

2. Where is the money coming from to educate foreign nationals at the B.S. level? I am not sure that their undergraduate is necessarily free or that a comparably qualified undergradate might not end up with the same level of support. Maybe we should be expending less resources on certain majors that have limited employment opportunities to help support engineering, science, and IT majors (could be an interesting discussion on this board - what majors should be axed). At our state universities they are charging $2K more per year for engineering over most other majors. Kind of going in the wrong direction.

3. Not so much a stacked deck in engineering. We have a strong foreign representation in our profession but it is not dominated at this point.

Would your brother-in-law have a better chance at a job if the H1-B Visa types (either as an individual or from the corporation) have to pay $50K/yr to work in this country? If not, then you are in the wrong profession.

Could the work your brother-in-law do be done effectively in a foreign country? If the answer to that question is yes, then he has a problem (as I do). You can live like a king on $50K/yr in India. How do you keep the work product from these Indians out of this country to preserve your brother-in-law's job? It is actually harder to consider than an assembler's job for example.

I think a proposal like $50K/yr would flush alot of the current abuses out. An employer that really needs a particular skill set will be willing to pay, but, in general, they may be more likely to work towards retraining or being more aggressive in domestic recruitment.