@TooOld4School “The key is to get skilled immigrants who add value , pay more in taxes then they consume in government services, and start businesses. Their children also tend to be great assets. It has nothing to do with where they are from as long as they assimilate. What is terrible is losing a recent Masters or Ph.D. candidate in a marketable field to other countries because we would not offer them residency and work permits.”
My grandparents came here with few useful skills. My grandfather was a Vodka runner for his grandmother and then a deserter from a number of armies during the Russian civil war. He started as factory worker, and because Unions made sure that he got paid decent wages, by the time my father was a boy, my grandfather owned a grocery store. My father got his PhD at Columbia University, and I am a second generation PhD.
However, you would have banned my grandfather from coming into the USA because you would have claimed that he “wasn’t skilled”
Most of the Jews who immigrated to the USA at the turn of the 20th century had no skills. Nor did the Italians and Irish. The rhetoric that was used against them by the White Protestant majority of the USA sounded identical to the rhetoric that you are echoing here. Yet these people, or the children, or their grandchildren, were the architects of the rise of the USA to being a super power.
Immigrants drive economic and cultural growth. Unskilled immigrants are even better, since they can be trained to perform most of the day to day jobs that keep the country running. Trained immigrants are more difficult to retrain to the American requirements. A Professor from Germany of China will usually have a very difficult time teaching in the USA, and their research will be hampered by cultural and linguistic issues. However, teaching a newly arrived immigrant the basics of carpentry or plumbing is far easier, and they will perform as well or better than American born professionals.
This is not because carpentry is easier, but because, the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be set in their ways.
The USA does not need any more PhDs. Grad schools are churning out more PhDs than there are places for them to work, so why bring in more from other countries? The USA needs people in the professions, like carpenters, electricians, etc. In tech they need coders and other types of programmers. The USA needs people who can be trained to do these things, not people who are already trained to do stuff in a manner which fits their country and culture.