The ship and kidnapping reference to slavery is in poor taste, It might be easier to get your point across and help people be more open to exploring your perspective if you weren't so easy and loose with colloquialisms that are rooted in something that likely doesn't represent you.
And generally, when someone takes a criminally low level of pay for their high skill labor, all workers, domestic and international, suffer.
[0] This is the other side of the coin, career American engineers being fired and "forced"(for their severance) to train cheaper Replacements https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff... And Disney is just one example - tons of US companies "clean house" when they get frustrated at a high operating budget.
All labor, skilled or not, local or not, deserve basic dignity and respect.
The reality sadly is some groups have to work much harder for much less and it is leveraged against not only them, but other groups too.
Seeing freelancer rates worldwide slowly creep up may be a significant of things to come. The cheaper labor is getting g more specialized and expensive.
I fully agree. I hope these rates increasing will help the talent in this entire industry price itself better.
Other countries can obviously incentivize people and startups like the US does, and that may slowly close the culture gap, but the US is already way ahead in capital. It's also hard to justify incentivizing an industry which already makes more than most of a country does via capital injection. When half the country is food insecure, the 2-10th percentile of the country getting handed government money doesn't go over well, anywhere.
As someone who worked for a long time on H1b (at startups in US), I realized only later how shackled I was compared to even high skilled immigrants from other countries!
I think with tighter immigration restrictions in US and EU, its been amazing to see many product companies popping up in India (instead of just the IT services industry).
US is sitting on a golden egg (of H1b engineers in US). If US makes it difficult for Indian immigrants, sure the immigrants will lose in the short term, but long term it is good for Indian and Indians.
When I went to college in North Dakota, there was a similar feeling with kids from North Dakota getting technical degrees (computer science, engineering, medical) and then moving to Minnesota and getting jobs there as opposed to keeping that knowledge in state.
There was a real push to try and keep these people from moving to Minnesota. At the time, my three best friends and teammates were all from various parts of rural North Dakota. All ended up with engineering degrees. All said the same thing, "Why would I stay here and get paid $40K when I have a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, when I can take a job in Minnesota and make $80K?"