| | Pan,
I think the main fallacy leading to these people's fears is that fallacy that there are a limited number of jobs. With that premise, then yes, if more people come to this country then there will be fewer jobs left for Americans.
Immigrants to the US also start businesses and create jobs. Many of them come here to start businesses because the laws in their own countries are too anti-business, with too many regulations and too high of taxes. Also, this is where the most skilled workers are to be found.
There is also a network effect. The more high-tech workers that come to America, the more America becomes the high-tech capital of the world and the more businesses come here to hire high-tech workers. So foreign high-tech workers contribute to expanding the number of high-tech jobs in this respect as well.
Also, a foreign worker doesn't send all of his money back home. He spends it on rent, food, services, car, etc, creating jobs for Americans that way. And he can't live for pennies a day in America.
But all this is maybe a little beside the point. The point is that whoever wants to work, works. The only question is how efficiently he can work and how productive he can be. During market downturns (caused by the government printing of money) maybe a person who wants to work as a programmer can't and has to do something for which he's overqualified; but in general, if a programmer wants to work as a programmer and he can't find anyone to hire him, he can either start his own business, lower the wage that he's seeking, lower the job that he's seeking (i.e. be willing to take a QA or tech support job instead of a system software job), or temporarily go back to school to become more employable. When the economy picks up again, he can change jobs or demand a raise. But in general, more workers, including more foreign workers, don't change the fact that if a person wants to work, he works. (Minimum wage laws aside.)
Jobs are simply the work that people do; "jobs" is not some magical limited commodity that needs to be rationed.
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