Yeah, this whole idea seems a little misunderstood.

Here's some of the high-level effects of bringing international talent of all sorts to the US of year:

1) more talent in the US

2) less talent in other nations

3) the US can ignore pre-university education and opportunity problems

1 and 2 are great for the US government and the top of the US economy, but bad for pretty much everybody else.

3 is pretty awful for a huge number of actual US citizens. Especially given the current state of our nation, this seems like a problem.

I don't believe in "talent". It's all about nurture. If you need more talented people in huge fields for generations, yet half of your nation doesn't have college degrees, the problem is that you are not investing in your people successfully. If we invested more in education and resources for kids, parents, and families from before conception through early childhood and education, we would not have a shortage for fields like... computer science and engineering. These aren't fields that just popped up, they've been a big deal for a century.

This. This is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading through these threads. Logged in just to upvote, but might as well say: "Thanks for being out there my thought-doppelganger!"

Right, but the visas are not being exclusively used for IT workers. Instead of weeding out abuse all current policies seem to be to just blindly make immigration harder. Making it harder for all specialized fields to hire the folks they need doesn't help anyone. The administration is just pandering to it's anti immigrant base instead of solving hard problems.

Bringing in raw talent and nurturing them here has been successful for USA. That is the student visa route.. I think you are referring to H1B?