Given that immigration laws are import quotas, that the free market will fix things is a confused argument. There's no such free market in software engineering labour.
Can you explain this a little bit? Not trying to sound combative, just would like to hear your thoughts!
Import quotas are well studied. When you limit the number of foreign cars, foreign commodities etc that can enter your country, you drive up the price. Local suppliers of those goods will benefit at the expense of local consumers of those goods.
But humans, unlike cars or bananas, come with lasting and deep impacts on a local society. It is a very human thing to wish to control who belongs to your ingroup, even if that ingroup is an abstraction of continental scope and with hundreds of millions of existing members.
But the fact the immigration restrictions arises from ancient social logic doesn't change its economic nature, its economic morphology if you will. And immigration restrictions are isomorphic onto any other import quota. They artificially raise the price of local suppliers (US citizens) at the expense of local consumers (US companies).
As an Australian this is less of a problem for me. We have a special secret backdoor into the US engineering market in the form of the E-3 visa.
The flow of information between transacting parties is a fairly central problem of economics. It's believed to be why companies exist (since alternatively the logical end point for a perfect free market is a thin gas of individual, rational agents), and it explains the "Market for Lemons".
Solving that problem preoccupies a large part of the economy. And making it worse, another large part. All hail the Red Queen.
The prevalence of spammers and scammers is how this manifests on freelancing sites.
> the logical end point for a perfect free market is a thin gas of individual, rational agents
Is that like, the "heat death" of the market economy? (Of capitalist society, actually.)
It's only a model. Discovering why it's wrong has been very fruitful and instructive for economists.
By the same reasoning, the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for any creature living on Earth, because we can always import more energy from the Sun.
Strictly speaking, "if you wish to build an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Fine, but the rest of us have work to do and can cope with imperfect models.