Maybe this comes off as too negative: but that "America is built on the hard work of immigrants" meme is an absolutely tone-deaf talking point. Many people hear hear that phrase, and immediately assume you are not arguing in good faith.

Yes, immigrants built America. But so did enslaved people. So did natives. So did rebellious colonists of the British empire. Most of those people did not consider themselves immigrants - and nor do their descendants.

Many immigrants have contributed amazing things to our nation, and they still do. But immigrants as a group are not a monolith. Many of the "highly skilled workers" that come over on H1Bs, are frankly - not highly skilled workers. Many are semi-skilled workers who are preferred over qualified Americans because they work for low wages and nearly never quit when abused.

Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us. If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants. But it's absurd to say to reduce this to "immigrants = good = America". Not when we know the current system is abusive to both immigrants, and to the Americans who are part of the toxic workplaces that the H1B visa-mill paradigm has created.

Are Colonists treated as bad as immigrants in this country at the moment? The post is about immigrants so that's why I'm talking about immigrants. People who are immigrants are still in the transition phase and this is a clear sign that they are less welcome.

Not many people are capable of traveling from distance places away, learning a new language, and then starting from scratch, with no family or friends. I'd give them a bit of credit, especially since their contributions are still being uncovered after being purposely devalued.

To your point, there are of course other hard working demographics in the US, but limiting the number of H1Bs that can come over is slamming the door on people who rightly deserve to be in the US.

I'm fairly certain that anyone who openly declared themselves a colonizer for some overseas empire would not be welcomed today.

My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today.

The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).

> Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us.

Agreed!

> If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants.

This is really just not a hard problem at all to solve from a policy perspective. Political will has been a big problem; both parties have campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has materialized. Corporations with political influence love the status quo as it allows them to import workers for similar or lower wages who can't quit or do anything that would risk them losing their job without being sent home.