This news is ominous to me (bolding mine):
At the end of 2006, more than 1 million skilled professionals
(engineers, scientists, doctors, researchers) and their families were
in line for a yearly allotment of only 120,000 permanent resident
visas. The wait time for some people ran longer than a decade. In the
meantime, these workers were trapped in "immigration limbo." If they
changed jobs or even took a promotion, they risked being pushed to the
back of the permanent residency queue. We predicted that skilled
foreign workers would increasingly get fed up and return to countries
like India and China where the economies were booming.
Why should we care? Because immigrants are critical to the country's long-term economic health. Despite the fact that they constitute only 12% of the U.S. population, immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley's technology companies and contributed to more than 25% of our global patents. They make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor's degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. Immigrants have co-founded firms such as Google, Intel, eBay, and Yahoo!
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