It’s done a good job of attracting and bringing in that talent for 200 years. I suspect that every person who commented here has ‘imported talent’ somewhere in their family tree.

Now it should stop? Or there should be some articifial quota?

Any argument for a quota could be made at any time in the US history. Imagine if we had a quota in the 1800′s? The US would have been a province in the 20th century instead a world power.

Having worked in Silicon Valley, where salaries are sky-high, ‘imported’ workers get pretty much the same as anyone else. The reason they’re brought in is for their talent and skillset, and if they are good, they will get hired away by someone else quickly if you aren’t paying them a competitive salary.

The argument for quotas is basically socialism. Nothing wrong with that if that’s your belief, I just don’t think it’s a path to a great country.

I’m for getting the best talent in the world into the USA, so that we maintain our lead as the technical leader.

I will also say that I am an immigrant (just getting my citizenship next week), and I am very proud to be part of this country.

America is a country of immigrants. Let’s keep it that way.

Maybe this would distort the higher end of the market?

The US is awash in native born US citizens with world class qualifications in computer science, long, deep, and up to date experience in software development and practical computing, but absolutely, positively, permanently unemployable as software developers at any price in any capacity, PERIOD. They can send 1000 resumes and get fewer than 10 interviews and no offers when earlier in their careers they could send a dozen resumes, go on seven interviews, and get five offers.

Software developers can do well if they start their own businesses, but for getting hired as an employee the field is a disaster for native born US citizens. The main reason is that the US NSF long had a policy to require academic computer science grant applications to support students, and the schools were encouraged to get the students from outside the US. Here the NSF deliberately flooded the US with foreign born computer science graduates of US schools. The NSF had a staff of economists ‘engineering’ the over-supply.

The norms then became that, in the US, software developers had to be foreign born and young. US born developers are much less welcome; US born and out of college 10 or more years is a black mark on a resume more serious than a felony conviction and hard time in prison, literally.

Foreign born and over 35 is also a black mark. The guy that manages the gas station in the next small town has a Master’s in computer science, is foreign-born, and over 35.

Net, in computer science and ‘information technology’, three points are crucial: (A) Never claim to anyone that you have qualifications in anything technical. PERIOD. F’get about it. It’s at best your own secret recipe for your own secret sauce. (B) Give up on being an employee. Nearly anywhere in the US, a sole proprietor with an electrician’s license can do better than an employee with a Ph.D. in computer science. It’s just true. Some people who come to the US are smart and start, say, a landscaping business, but some others are dumb and get a Ph.D. in computer science and try to get kids through college as an employee. (C) Find something that needs doing that you can do with technical means, do it, sell it based on what it can do for the customer, give demos but never mention the core secret sauce, and keep the money. That is, start a business. If you do well, maybe buy Chrysler. I hear that it may go for only $4 billion. Then, hire yourself as an employee. That will be easier than getting hired as an employee for ‘software development’.

The folks I’ve hired from the PRC and Eastern Europe (including a team I built in the former Soviet Union) have way out-CS’ed our domestic CS undergrads.

Now don’t get me wrong, our team is 2nd to none, but with the bar set high (because we need it there), the pipeline is outrageously narrow.

The grad programs we’re working with incl. CU, U of Illinois, and Berkeley are largely (sometimes exclusively non-US students), and they’re doing some great stuff. When they gradute, they get to go home (although many would like to stay).

Personally, I’d hand out green cards with graduate diplomas. This would help our competitiveness as a nation.

The end result of all of this is that the limit is quickly filled because there are a lot of cheap CEOs who just don’t understand the fact that lots of cheap inexperienced coders will cost you far more in the long run than a handful of really talented ones.

I think that, in general, there are plenty of talented US developers but people either don’t want to pay what they’re worth or they’re not offering positions that are interesting enough to tempt them away from their current jobs.

p.s. before anyone flames me for this I do believe that there are some truly talented programmers in other countries, it’s just that the visas tend to go out to the hordes of cheap cheap programmers, and you get what you pay for.