It’s hard to intelligently address this without the luddites trotting out tired mischaracterizations based solely on highly distilled views of “doesn’t agree with me.” Given the forum, I’ll hope it’s largely not the case. The basic problem with the last half of the article is not immigrants. I very much agree immigrants can be a very positive component of the US. The problem instead is a horribly abused policy around immigration that disadvantages everyone for corporate gain. The poverty of other nations is enticing workers into substandard conditions in turn turning them into an option to replace or ignore domestic workers.

“immigration reform -- the driver of our country”

What a dangerous overstatement. It has clearly been a core piece of the fabric of the country. But how many billion in population must we reach before can we say we’re driven by more than just more coming from abroad?

“Currently, all of the H1B visas are filled inside of a week, Eshoo noted”

Did Eshoo note WHY? On that quote alone it could sound as though we have over 52 times more need than the quota fills. Reality tells us there’s an annual deadline and offshoring companies know to flood the applications in the first week for their comparatively cheap labor wants. It’s a bit like fueling a gun debate by claiming the European murder rate from 1936 – 1945 was hundreds of times that of the prior ten years with neglecting to indicate war-related deaths are part of your statistic.

“75 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign born”

This tells me something has gone horribly wrong. If we’re supposedly trying to raise STEM, what does it tell you that in the premier domestic hub for many such disciplines it is essentially, “Locals need not apply.”? If there’s some dire shortage, then apparently the H-1B has done a terrible job of complementing workers while we increase our needed skills and it needs to be retooled or there’s not really a shortage, in which case there’s something wrong with the environment or workers are being selected for reasons detrimental to the nation’s good and it needs to be retooled. Either way, something doesn’t add up to right.