Blatham
"America, the real America, the America of the founders is under siege from unwelcome and unsavory immigrants."
I think the subject of this thread is about ILLEGAL Immigrants.
Your above quote is about immigrants.
I respectfully differ the above quote.
"Strict limits on US professional visas chase away talent. The H-1B visa allows US firms to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations on a temporary basis. But an increasing pool of international students in the US combined with growing demand for skilled-labor visas in many sectors make that visa hard to come by.
Meanwhile, other nations have fine-tuned their immigration policies, devising point systems to attract the most talented workers. As a result, some US offices of highly competitive multinational firms could eventually shrink in size and relevance.
The numbers are not insignificant. More than 560,000 students came from around the world to study at US colleges in 2006, reports the Institute of International Education. The international presence is particularly strong at the nation's elite schools and in science and math programs: International students as a percentage of total enrollment ranges from 25 and 20 percent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, respectively, to 12 percent at Dartmouth and Brown.
With the US setting an annual cap at 65,000 H-1B visas, only a fraction of the students get to stay for work.
Of 15 employers that hired the most MIT graduates in 2006, 12 are firms that also lead in hiring H-1B employees, including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Intel and J.P.Morgan.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9907
There is growing opposition in many countries to immigration, viewed by some as costing government treasuries and diluting national cultures. Philippe Legrain, a British economist and former adviser to the director-general of the World Trade Organization, argues that productivity flourishes in culturally diverse cities and that people are willing to pay to live and work in such fertile environments. Invoking foreign-born luminaries such as author Salman Rushdie and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Legrain paints a rich picture of globally-minded societies led by the very people once cast as outsiders. All of these arguments are, at their core, riffs on an age-old truism that the mind expands when encountering modes of thinking that differ from its own. Diversity promotes innovation which in turn propels economic growth; thus, the argument that immigration offers no economic benefit is false. As more people migrate, with a range of reasons, governments must address the challenges obstructing the free flow of ideas that ultimately enrich us all.
A list of America's Nobel prize-winners shows many composed of teams of US-born and foreign-born talent. In fact, as Scott Page explains in "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools," a diverse team of talented individuals is actually better at solving problems than a group of likeminded geniuses.
Just look at Silicon Valley: Google, Yahoo!, eBay and many other big names of the internet revolution were co-founded by immigrants. In fact, nearly half of America's venture-capital-funded start-ups were co-founded by immigrants. And founders like Sergey Brin of Google, Jerry Yang of Yahoo! and Pierre Omidyar of eBay arrived in the US not as highly-skilled immigrants, but as children.
US universities also attract the world's top graduate students in science and engineering, and studies show that an increase in the number of foreign students not only raises patents granted to universities, it also gives a big boost to patents granted to businesses, as foreign graduates who stay on in the US add to the productivity of the wider economy.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9907
