This is a reasonable article, and Vivek Wadhwa is certainly entitle to express an opinion, but I do strongly object to his statement that "xenophobes will cheer

This is a reasonable article, and Vivek Wadhwa is certainly entitle to express an opinion, but I do strongly object to his statement that "xenophobes will cheer" these findings. He didn't quite claim that the only people who might disagree with him are xenophobes, but I do think he implies it. People who have read my posts on hn are probably aware that I take a less enthusiastic view of the high tech visa programs, especially the H1B. I resent the implication that this makes me a xenophobe, as I absolutely believe that a healthy, substantial percentage of foreign nationals at our universities and in our high tech work force is without question a good and positive thing. But I think we pushed it to the point where these visas were used by high tech as a crutch, and allowed engineering careers to slowly become uncompetitive with law, mba, medicine, and so forth (a RAND institute study recently confirmed this, suggesting that the "low interest of US students in science/engineering will reverse when pay and other work conditions improve" (yes, I'm paraphrasing) I'm not as optimistic, because you can't just revive these professions once they are decimated.. Americans were deterred from engineering to the point where they lost all interest, and these visa programs were the only way to get students. But guess what? The day will come (and soon, it appears) where we can offer as many visas and green cards as we like, but we won't find any takers. Eventually, someone has to recognize that it wasn't wise to allow Americans to become a small minority in american engineering ms/ph.d programs, because nobody is more likely to stay in the US.