Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.

It’s clear that there’s a shortage of good software engineers in the world. But it’s important to understand that Silicon Valley is facing an artificial shortage of good software engineers. There are lots of highly-qualified software engineers from India, Russia, and elsewhere—even Canada—who would love to work in Silicon Valley but can’t, for visa reasons. Even if you’ve earned your degree at Stanford University, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s decidedly non-trivial for a foreigner to get a job in Palo Alto or Cupertino upon graduation. You know the companies, you know the people, they know you, they would love to hire you—but the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services often gets in the way, forcing you out of the country instead.

If you’re more ambitious than that, of course, the situation gets even worse. There are at least ways of getting a work visa for the United States; they’re far too onerous, and leave far too much to chance, but it’s possible. If you want to become an entrepreneur, on the other hand, there’s really no point in even trying. Recent graduates are perfectly positioned to build the great companies of the future: They’re bright, they’re hard-working, they’re up to speed on the state of the art, and they generally don’t yet have families which require job security and a steady income. But if they’re not American citizens, it’s almost impossible for them to build the economy of the future in this way.

Still, Silicon Valley has historically been a relatively good place for immigrants—think Intel’s Andy Grove, or Google’s Sergei Brin. And that’s no coincidence. The most vibrant areas of the economy always attracts the highest rates of immigrant workers. Immigrants—especially rich and well-educated immigrants — work hard, create jobs, pay much more in taxes than they take out in benefits, and tend to have overachieving children: They’re a recipe for economic growth and prosperity. But while the Statue of Liberty’s beaconed hand is said to cast a welcoming glow around the world, in practice the United States is no longer a welcoming place for immigrants, especially when compared to its Anglophone competitors like Canada and England. America would have an all but insurmountable competitive advantage in the fight for talented immigrants, were it only to bother competing.

The lack of mobility of the skilled global elite is a microcosm of a much larger problem—namely, the lack of labor mobility more generally, both between and also within countries. Detroit, for instance, has painfully high levels of unemployment just because there aren’t nearly enough jobs in the city, any more, to support its population. The solution should be obvious: People in Detroit should move to where jobs are more plentiful. In fact, our single national currency is premised on the idea that that sort of labor mobility between states will be relatively easy, and that geographic imbalances won’t remain permanent. Of course, one of the reasons people don’t just pick up and move is that changing one’s surroundings is an inherently difficult and painful process, especially for families.