I do think there's some real hyperbole in this article. A 3% decline (that appears to be the figure cited in this article) may be a troublesome trend, but I'm

I do think there's some real hyperbole in this article. A 3% decline (that appears to be the figure cited in this article) may be a troublesome trend, but I'm not sure I'd call it "way down". The author also cites the loss of diversity in graduate programs. All I have is personal experience: as an American in a PhD program in Engineering at Berkeley, I became very, very accustomed to being the only person in the room who spoke english as a first language. People who were born in California (or came up through the Californian educational system) are definitely a minority in these graduate programs (This is rare - Indians a not tiny minority in the grad programs at IIT. I doubt that French citizens a tiny minority at the École Polytechnique?). Personally, I think it would be a good trend for the US if 60% of the students in our graduate STEM programs had come up through our own educational system. I read so much bile in both directions - and by throwing out the "xenophobe" accusation I think that the author of this post just added a bit more bile. I can understand why someone might start to equate criticism of the H1B program with xenophobes after glancing at some of the comments (and let's be fair here, there's often a tremendous amount of anti-americanism in these comments on H1B issues as well), but I insist that a person can reasonably want to see a higher percentage of US citizens in STEM programs in american universities, and should be able to advocate this without being called a xenophobe.