The phoney programmer shortage

Norman Matloff writes in the SF CA paper:

Once again, the tech industry is putting heavy pressure on Congress to expand the H-1B visa program. Though the industry says the foreign workers are needed to remedy a tech labor shortage, for most employers the attraction of H-1Bs visa holders is simply cheap labor. The H-1B visa program allows skilled immigrants to work in the United States on a temporary basis. ...

The visas granted in computer-related fields are 10 times more numerous than in the next most common tech field, electrical engineering. The industry claims that it needs to import workers to remedy a severe labor shortage. Yet this flies in the face of the economic data.

He's right. The H-1B program is a scam. There is no programmer labor shortage.