>>Something else is bothering me: when I learned these things, the definition of free market included three basic freedoms of movement: of money, commodities and workforce. Now money moves freely across the world (anyone can invest anywhere, almost), commodities are traded in all directions... but somehow globalization fails to include the freedom of movement of workforce. I have some ideas on how that came to be overlooked, but you probably wouldn't like it.
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>I was wondering what your take on all this was. You are here on a work visa aren't you, or did you get your citizenship?

You should retire, really :). It took you so long to get to the issue of my status - I expected it'd happen long ago. Your reflexes are not as they were...

No, no citizenship yet, I fell through in one of those cracks in the law. With a H-1B, with the addition made in October 2000, if you switch jobs, you go back to square one with the process. It was designed to keep the H-1Bers competitive, i.e. not the indentured slavery as they were characterized before that, but also to make them more temporary. In my case, I wasn't changing jobs to make any advances - it was the dot-com bubble burst that either tanked my employers, or there just wasn't enough work or money. So my process was restarted four times, and INS is getting progressively slower and sloppier and more expensive each time. So, who knows how many years... I may even retire before that.