We could probably pay whatever it would take to get more people in our US-based offices. However, we cannot do that and remain competitive as a business when our competition can cut costs more effectively that we can.

And when my company stops winning contracts because we aren't competitive, then we're all out of a job over there.

Believe me, I was LIVID when my VP of my business unit told me, to my face, when I got my last raise that "[he] isn't going to get in a bidding war for programmers when [he] can pay $10k/year to get the same Human Resource over in India"

I wanted to punch the guy, I really did. However, since then I found that my job has gone from being technical to being the liason between the technical human resource units to the non-technical client representatives. I spend most of my days on presentation teleconferences instead of actually programming much.