No one here is pointing the finger at foreigners, nor is anyone here advocating for protectionism. Personally, I'm an anarchist. I don't believe borders should exist, nor do I believe passports(which now require mandatory biometric enrollment) should be required for travel between these borders. My objection to these borders is that they are used to keep labor bound to an area, while capital is free to flow wherever with greatly less restriction or scrutiny, and THAT is something I have a massive problem with. It is a power disparity that shouldn't be allowed to exist, yet is enabled by the existence of government, to the benefit of the corporations government works in conjunction with.
There are loads of jobs for engineers, at least advertised jobs. I applied to more than 7,000 of them from 2018 to 2021, which I kept on a spreadsheet. I ended up washing dishes at a restaurant for over a year with my engineering degree and at the time 9 years engineering experience, applying to better jobs every day, and rarely hearing anything back. Getting so much as a phone interview was about a 1 in 300 event. There were companies that offered me an engineering position here in the U.S. for as little as $12 per hour. Another company offered me not much more above that, and when I explained that the wage wasn't close to the amount advertised, that it wasn't even enough to move out of my parent's basement, that the bottom market rate for that pay for someone inexperienced was said to be at least twice what they were offering and that I had 9 years experience, and then explained I could make that same amount they were offering me on the phone as a cashier at a big box store, I was called a "typical entitled millennial" and then the man with the foreign accent on the other side of the phone explained how poor the people in his country were and that I was "ungrateful" for not jumping at that opportunity. I then asked him how much money he made, and he became irate, because in all likelihood he made six-figures and didn't like being called out for his greed. Obviously, I didn't get that job, nor would I have taken it at a wage so low that I would have remained just as well off washing dishes at the local COVID den. Not even worth the risks/liabilities that the job entails, at such poor wages.
Fortunately, in 2021, after thousands of applications, about a score of phone interviews, and 3 years, I did land my current position and am currently being paid what I am worth. But it was NOT easy to get this job, and my current employer sat on my resume for the better part of a year.
Just my personal experience.
One gentleman I graduated college with has 2 patents to his name, designed from scratch a one-wheeled self-balancing electric unicycle including having done the embedded system programming himself, and was homeless for four years. He eventually was able to rent out a warehouse to get off the street, and was priced out of shelter for years because the deadend retail jobs he worked didn't pay enough for rent once the student loans were garnished from his check.
One time, Boeing put an ad for a job that he was qualified for, which he applied to. He was ignored, and Boeing claimed to the government they couldn't find qualified applicants for the position. Some VISA applicants were hired for the position for $9/hour, when in 1990, that position would have paid closer to $90/hour. They didn't know how to do the coding correctly, resulting in multiple plane crashes for the 737MAX planes and hundreds of deaths. My friend remained homeless, but the CEO kept his golden parachute and Boeing got another taxpayer-funded bailout to avoid taking any responsibility for the series of event leading up to this, with the workers receiving more of the blame! The foreigner isn't the problem here.
The official government statistics on unemployment in this country are a laughable joke, and a massive gaslight to everyone who is struggling to find work in their field, even in a field of high demand.
My complaint is not levied towards the foreigners. It is levied towards the economic system we are living under, the ruling class who manipulated the conditions to where they are, and to the entities we are forced to work for in exchange for money in order to have access to the necessities of life.
Globalization, more than benefitting the poor, is being used to funnel money to the ruling class and to consolidate their power over humanity. If the majority of the money generated via labor were to actually go to workers in poor countries, they'd be living much closer to how Americans live in terms of living standard than they currently are. Most of the rest of the world may be doing better than it has 1-2 generations ago, but the so-called first world nations are in a state of incipient collapse, and the world's natural resources are rapidly being squandered(especially on military adventures, excessive living standards of the rich, and mass surveillance) in an economic system that promotes planned obsolescence, filling up land fills. Living standards that were common in the 1st world decades ago are now only sustained by most living in those countries with debt, because the prevailing wages in the 1st world no longer can afford the lifestyles people had become accustomed to, and debt has been used for people to pretend that they can afford things they really can't. That game of musical chairs can't continue forever. The U.S. in particular is beset by a series of major bubbles that are eventually going to pop as soon as the gravy train of endless taxpayer dollars and endless Federal Reserve money printing comes to an end(the bubbles being housing, stock market, 401Ks, pensions, bond markets, ect.). Most working Americans are currently primed to have whatever wealth they've managed to build up for themselves through decades of labor ripped away from them, and it won't be enriching the world's poor in the process.
The problem isn't that Americans can't afford to buy large houses. The problem is that Americans can't afford to buy a modest home, even a fixer-upper in the hood, without being driven into debt for decades of their lives. All of the permits, fees, taxes, materials, just to fix up even a cheap home, is an amount that is beyond the ability for people in the bottom 80% to save for. The bottom 80% of Americans currently live paycheck to paycheck, and are trapped in a cycle of spending all of their money on rent/mortgage, utilities, and servicing any debt(medical debt, student loan debt, used car debt, credit cards, ect). Roughly 3/4 of Americans don't even have $1,000 in savings, and roughly 2/3 don't even have $500 in savings. Then in most of the U.S., due to greedy local governments seeking to extort home owners for property tax revenue, there are now even minimum square footage requirements for new home construction. There are large swathes of the U.S. where the minimum new home size is over 2,000 sq ft, and where trailers, RVs, tiny homes, are zoned out of existence. Then there's the issue of developers building the biggest homes they can, in order to pad their profit margins. Government at various levels wants you paying property tax revenue on oversized/overbuilt/expensive homes, and they make you pay fees for inspections/permits on every little thing you would do to that property, all of which quickly gets into the tens of thousands of dollars in the case you're trying to fix up an old home to live in. If you buy a fixer-upper property, you're generally not just allowed to move into it. You have to get it up to code before the municipal government will even consider granting you an occupancy permit on property that you supposedly own, after you paid for it, and then they demand you pay a recurring fee to them to live in it. In all, it's a totally crap system designed to make you work longer than should be necessary, just to have access to shelter, under the guise of "public safety" and other similar excuses that government uses to justify the expensive burdens it places on people in effort to maximize the amount of money extracted from them.
All the more reason I'm all for people squatting in places. Starve the beast. I haven't bought into the "American Dream" and don't want it.
There are also large swathes of the U.S. where big box stores selling cheap crap are the only places to buy goods from for a radius of tens of miles. I live in an urban area where there are a lot more choices than that, but trying to find American-made or other quality products available inside of a physical store is a fools errand. I'd gladly pay the premium if the product were available. Most of my tools are cheaply-made Chinese crap because that is all that was available after making visits to multiple stores, and I'm not going to support Amazon with my money if I can avoid doing so.
In light of all this, it is no wonder why there are so many homeless people in the USA, and why their numbers are increasing. It was a series of deliberate policy decisions that led to the current state of affairs, and the losers are built into the system, no matter how hard they work. When someone gives up, I can't fault them for it. I was almost there myself.
Since I finally got a decent opportunity, I'm running with it. I'm saving up my money so I can go off grid. I'd like to get a home base established in a rural area with as few taxes/zoning restrictions/building codes as possible to put my belongings, maybe build up a tinyhome and a small workshop, and then I'm going to use my custom electric "bicycle" car to travel all over the place for as cheaply as possible with as little environmental footprint as possible. Even though it now has more than 70k miles on it, I've done surprisingly little touring with it. That mileage was racked up with lots of mundane A to B driving in my local area since building it in 2016, and it has literally saved me tens of thousands of dollars over that period versus using a conventional car. This "bicycle" is a car that theoretically everyone on Earth could have and use on a daily basis without it causing an environmental nightmare, as its resource footprint is about 1/50th that of a conventional car. My electricity usage for this thing gives me the energy efficiency equivalent of 4,000 miles per gallon! Long distance travel in this thing is also a good way to test the platform, so that I can refine it, and maybe even build/sell them someday. My shelter needs are basic. A tent, and/or some abandoned buildings, will serve me nicely, and my vehicle is small enough that I can take it indoors with me for safe keeping. If I were rich, I'd love to build one for every gutterpunk I come across and give it away to them for free, as they could definitely use such a thing.
I'll eventually be homeless by choice, with money in the bank and lots of options/things to do. That's a LOT nicer of a situation than being homeless and destitute due to circumstances out of one's control, and I'm fortunate I've never been the latter, even if I've had close calls and even though I've been homeless with savings. Not having any money is a totally different world.
Sorry, but this doomer rhetoric focusing in on how hard well-educated, highly-skilled middle class people have it is really out of touch, imo. There are still loads of jobs for engineers, software developers and so on. After healthcare, it's probably one of the easiest sectors to find employment in - all over the world! It cuts real close to xenophobia when well-educated Americans start complaining about foreigners stealing their jobs. Give me a break.
There is a lot to dislike about the H-1B program, in particular that workers who come in on that visa are essentially owned by the employer who sponsored them - they don't have the freedom and flexibility to change jobs that ordinary American permanent residents do - but the solution to that injustice is not to ban foreigners from coming to America altogether, it's to actually open the doors to skilled workers in the same way that countries with digital nomad visas do. People with in-demand skills should be allowed to freely travel and seek employment wherever they like, with the same protections and guarantees around their freedom to work as any local resident. (Arguably even people without in-demand skills should enjoy the same rights too, but for the purpose of this post, let's focus on the skilled sector.)
It's absolutely true that globalization has meant a lot of jobs in the US went overseas. But it also means that literally hundreds of millions of people whose communities used to live in poverty unimaginable to most Americans can now afford lifestyles that seem impossibly luxurious compared to just one or two generations ago. Like, maybe they now have electric lights and heating in their village. Maybe their children can now wear shoes instead of walking barefoot in the mud. Maybe they get to eat something besides rice and lard every night. And - most importantly - they can send their own kids to school, and to university, and all of those kids can now dream of travel and freedom and a life that isn't dictated by subsistence.
And meanwhile, most of these countries still have a worse social welfare system than the US does, which is saying something. There is still far greater poverty in even middle income countries than there is the US. Which isn't to say that there is no poverty or hardship in the US. Of course there is. But it's important to keep some sense of perspective when declaring the world to be in a state of utter collapse.
If the problem is that Americans can't afford to buy large houses, instead of blaming it on foreigners or the companies who employ them, maybe it's better to think about what kind of house most Americans prefer to live in. How big is the house? What features go into it? Where do they want to put it? Why is it so expensive to build? It's worth considering that many houses in America are built by exactly the immigrants you might want to denigrate for accepting a wage many Americans consider to be beneath them. Speaking of which - why, if Americans are so concerned about how poorly their blue-collar workers are paid, do they continue to buy products at rock-bottom prices that have been imported from countries whose blue-collar workers work for less? Do they really care about fair wages, or do they just want lots of cheap stuff?
Like, i get that Americans are having a tough time of things. At least white, middle-class Americans enjoyed a brief period of history where they could go through life in autopilot, expecting that they'd get everything handed to them on a plate. It's a bummer for them that that time is over. There are a lot of things that undeniably suck right now. America - like Canada, and the UK, and Australia, and several other of the world's wealthiest countries - has a real problem of affordable housing, and in particular affordable housing in exactly the places where most people want to live. All of these countries have issues (in different degrees) with providing healthcare to the people. And the US on top of that has issues with gun violence and various other forms of homegrown extremism. Life for a certain class of people in rich countries ain't as great as it used to be. So work on changing it. Don't point the finger at other people who are just trying to build better lives for themselves and their families.
Or, you know, don't work on changing it. It's hard to go up against the machine when there's still a sizable chunk of society for whom surrounding themselves in cheap luxuries beats any kind of ideological purity. So the other option - especially if you are a skilled worker - is to go to another country and work there instead. Choose to take adventage of exactly the same freedoms that other migrant workers have chosen in coming to the US. Find a place where the money you earn can afford you the kind of lifestyle you find acceptable. I wouldn't give this advice to a person living in absolute poverty, since that's some pull yourself up by the bootstraps shit. But to Americans with an engineering degree, come on. There's degrees of hardship and this is a low one. There is work all over. Not only are American STEM grads already privileged enough to have an education in an in-demand field, they are overwhelmingly likely to also have male privilege as well, plus the privilege of being native English speakers and owners of one of the best passports in the world... All of which make it especially easy for these folks to travel and apply their trade.
Either way, there's better ways to criticize the capitalist system than to advocate for protectionism or to suggest the US is somehow worse than a "third world country".