At minimum it is unseemly, at maximum an example of chutzpah as practiced in Silicon Valley. Having shot themselves in the foot, some prominent tech billionaires want the president to bypass Congress and minister to their wound. They have poured cash into his campaign coffers, and now is payback time. They want him to increase the number of H-1B visas that allow them to hire high-skilled foreign tech workers. Which he has promised to do, never mind that Microsoft has just laid off thousands of workers. Or more important, that some of the very companies that want to cash in their Obama IOUs have been engaged in a conspiracy—get this—to depress wages.

Having formed a cartel to prevent “poaching” and competition for workers and having kept wages of these workers below levels that would have prevailed in a competitive market, CEOs in the home of fierce competition for technological advantage now find that below-free-market wages are producing a labor shortage. To dampen any increase in pay that American tech workers might finally get now that the conspiracy has been uncovered, the unchastened executives want Obama to increase the supply of foreign laborers.