5. Visas to visit/ study/ work in the USA are under-priced.

The guest-work visas are under-priced, and executives have been under-investing in education and training of both new-hire and retained employees.

It costs the US government over $1K just to process the paper-work for a visa application.

2009-09-24
Teresa Watanabe & Anna Gorman _Los Angeles CA Times_
USCIS running $118M short, considering fee increase
"a fee increase of 69% to $675 in 2007...   a special congressional appropriation to help reduce application back-logs had run out.   To help close the short-fall, Mayorkas said, the agency has requested $206M from Congress..."

It's bizarre that in this post-2001 Sep. 11 time, we're still not conducting nor charging for proper background investigations of visa applicants. Such investigations can run over $35K in the USA, and much more to investigate those over-seas.   If we're charging less than that for a visa, then Milton Friedman was certainly correct when he said in 2002 that these visas are a huge subsidy to executives.

Here are a few words from someone who knows more about such things.

If you were selling F-150s for $500 apiece, and they were all grabbed up in the first two days, while your high-quality Corvettes, priced at $70K, were left on the lots, your reaction would not be to contract out to have some cheap imitations built.   You'd raise the prices on the F-150s, first, lower the prices on the Corvettes a little, and then gear up to make more F-150s. &nbps; Supply, Demand, AND Prices must adjust in an environment where initiation of force and fraud are discouraged.

"They want all the engineers they can get at the lowest price... they say they can't find enough talent, but what they really mean is that they can't find enough [pliant] people [with flexible/questionable ethics] at the rate they want to pay." --- Jared Berstein (Josh Hicks 2012-02-06 "president Obama's Google Plus 'hangout' claims about engineering demand" _Washington Post_)

There was no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

There is no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

No credible evidence of impending shortage of talented US citizen STEM workers has been produced.