> a profession that has some limitation to demand

>> This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.

Interesting observation. What you argue is true in theory, but I think we can all agree that 100% employment in IT is a practical impossibility. So is 0%, in the modern world. We just don't need to worry or think about it much because in a market economy, people have the right to respond to incentives, and when employment in IT gets too low relative to other professions, salaries start to spike relative to other professions, and when it gets too high, salaries start to drop relative to other professions.

I'm sure that employability in IT at minimum wage is very, very high. The problem would be keeping people capable of doing this kind of work in IT, as most of them would leave. The solution could be based on freedom - a market economy, where people are free to respond to the numerous factors, monetary and non-monetary, such as salary, bonus, possibility for growth, flexibility, work environment (required attendance at open office), location (urban/office park/outdoors/indoors), hiring process (long take home projects and/pr re-taking whiteboard data structures and algorithms exams at every interview) and so forth.

Another way to do this is to create a specific immigration category that allows employers in specific, narrowly defined fields to bestow - and revoke - residency and work rights on people who would like to immigrate. This only works if the system is generally restrictive, but if it is, it's a tremendous way to create a population of workers who can't respond to market signals. I truly believe that the H1B, driven by the general mentality that there are jobs "Americans (ie., people with choice) won't/can't do", rather than jobs that are too shitty to attract people with choice, are a big part of why high tech gets away with such shitty practices.

I support general immigration, but these targeted programs are egregious. Even the suggestion of granting green cards immediately to scientists and engineers doesn't work for me, because it still requires a heavy sunk cost into a particular field (again, coercing people into making a career choice as a condition of working in the US). Look at career prospects for research scientists. As far as I'm concerned, employers in these fields should have a problem hiring. I believe that the academic career path would look very, very different (and much more favorable for those who choose to do it) if universities didn't have such power over the path to living and working int he US as a skilled/educated person.

One basic condition of market economies is that the people who participate in them must be free. Once a non-freedom based visa program hits a certain scale, it can distort markets dramatically. I personally really do think that practices widely reviled in the tech world - such as open offices and take home interview projects, white board exams, and so forth - would collapse in a free economy. If people were free to say "fuck off" without getting deported and/or losing a very limited number of paths to skilled immigration, high tech would have to change to keep hiring. Salaries would go up, working conditions would improve, and guess what - all it takes is ensuring that immigrants, like citizens, are not coerced into a particular field as a condition of living and working in the US.