While I&#x27;m glad to see the NYTimes covering this issue, I am disappointed with the headline.  The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year.  These new free and full citizens pursue educations and careers in response to their personal life interests and market signals.   You know, that whole pesky freedom thing that corporations often despise in their workforce.  Some enter high tech, some don&#x27;t, and this article has absolutely nothing to do with this kind of immigration, at all.<p>This is about high tech companies lobbying congress for a special temporary guest worker visa (that allows for a dual intent to remain in the US), held and controlled by a corporation, where the guest worker resides in the US at the pleasure of the corporate &quot;sponsor&quot;, on the grounds that there is such a shortage of critical tech employees that we need to empower corporations to bestow the right to live and work in the US on non-citizen who possess these skills.  Some of these corporations have then turned around and fired US Citizens, some of whom are in fact immigrants, in order to replace them with workers brought in on this program.<p>While there is plenty of debate here on HN on the extent to which the new workers are &quot;captive&quot; in their jobs, I think we can all agree that the H1B workers absolutely are not free and full citizens, free to choose their own path in life, decide where they will live, what they will work on, what career they will pursue, and so forth.  Even if they can change jobs, they need to find a new corporate sponsor who bestows the right to live in the US on them.<p>This kind of corporate power over individuals, on a massive scale, really bothers me.  You can object deeply this while celebrating immigration that preserves the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and supporting general immigration (or even a more general version of skilled immigration).