That's an interesting statement. If so that tells me that the presumably experienced foreign engineers are not able to compete with new graduate American kids. So I take it that the salaries they want are not high enough for them to take the starting jobs.
It also infers that engineers are being fired/laid off and foreign engineers are being hired in their place. I've heard that happens but it seems really odd to me. A company saves $10K a year or maybe a bit more and hires in some unknown guy and fires somebody already doing the job. That really doesn't make a lot of sense.
But you could be right. I'm just not convinced yet that most of the problem isn't just a lack of supply of competent American technical wizards and we should be training more of them.
It does happen: I've seen it multiple times. It made the news when Disney tried to do it, but after they were hit with a wave of bad publicity they canceled their plans.
No, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But, the decision is being made by bean-counters or middle management who think engineers are interchangeable parts (like on an assembly line). They can't or won't measure important factors like quality and productivity.
I worked as a consultant for nearly 20 years, going into client offices and helping them monitor and evaluate their computer systems and networks. You quickly figure out who is deadwood, and who actually knows their job. I lost count of the number of times I returned to a customer, only to find the productive people had been replaced by H1B's or outsourcing -- and the replacements had no clue what they were doing.
In some cases, the reason I was asked to return is because their system performance and reliability had declined and they couldn't figure out why. I couldn't tell them it was because they laid off their competent people -- I could only point out the mistakes the replacements had made.
There ARE companies that have realized they made a mistake. But, they can't easily unwind it.
But you could be right. I'm just not convinced yet that most of the problem isn't just a lack of supply of competent American technical wizards and we should be training more of them.
We should be training more of them, just to keep the pipeline full. But, I'll tell you what I tell every college-age student that is considering a technology career: you can succeed, and do very well. But, you have to be at the top of the game, all the time.
If you want to work for a leading edge company like Apple, Google, or Facebook -- the competition is intense. You must have stellar grades at a top-ranked school. And if you can get that dream job, you can NEVER let up or you'll be "eased out". An alternative is to work for a start-up, but you'll be hopping from job to job, as most of them crash and burn.
If you graduate with mediocre grades and get a "typical" job doing Java application programming for a big company, you'll always be at risk for being replaced by an H1B or outsourcing.