Creating A Wage-Cutting Race Is Not 'Humane,' Good for Immigrants or Good for America

Following on my last post about immigration, I wanted to make sure everyone saw this important - if buried - piece from the trade press:

April 17, 2009 (Computerworld) The use of H-1B workers by U.S. companies is decreasing wages for computer programmers, system analysts and software engineers by as much as 6%, according to a study released this week by researchers at New York University's Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania...

"In this paper, we simply sought to dispel the myth that globalization generates no losers," wrote Prasanna Tambe, an assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at the Stern School, and Lorin Hitt, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton.

The high-tech industry would have us believe that the H-1B program exists to help them find workers when they can't find qualified American workers, and a mythology has emerged that claims H-1B workers have to be paid the same as domestic workers, and therefore avoids creating a wage-cutting competition.