I re-read Zumeta's article, and you're right, there is no discussion about why it's important to have Americans in these fields. He says that these fields are important, that we should be concerned that Americans are choosing to pursue other career paths, and that programs like the H1B are reducing the incentives further. But I'm not seeing an argument about why the US shouldn't just go ahead and staff all these positions with relatively poorly paid foreign nationals on visas.

This reminds me of Phil Greenspun's (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) opinion

"What's my idea for changing the incentives? I don't have any. I'm not one of the people who complains that there aren't enough women working as professors, janitors, or whatever. For whatever reason we've decided that science in America should be done by low-paid immigrants. They seem to be doing a good job. They are cheap. They are mostly guys, like other immigrant populations. If smart American women choose to go to medical, business, and law school instead of doing science, and have fabulous careers, I certainly am not going to discourage them. Imagine if one of those kind souls that Summers was speaking to had taken Condoleezza Rice aside and told her not to waste time with political science because physics was so much more challenging. Just think how far she might have gone..."

(full link at: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science)

Personally, I'm not nearly as cavalier about this, because I think that the availability of cheap foreign labor in a critical field is a short term phenomenon. India and China are already starting to lure back their students, and this trend will increase. I wouldn't be surprised if the day comes where India and China are hiring away US born engineers - it's still decades away, but it may well happen.

Some would say "ok, then market incentives will increase, and Americans will start to return to engineering." Sure, but slowly. I personally don't think it's quite that easy. It's more a question of population dynamics. Think of a species that has been reduced greatly in population... the passenger pigeon was headed for extinction without intervention even when large flocks were still observed.

Engineering takes time, effort, a system, a pipeline, mentorship, and so forth. Basically, it takes people like my grandfather (an engineer) encouraging me to take up the profession, and me encouraging my son, daughter, nephew, the kid on the street, to take it up too. I think that if you break this chain severely, it can take generations to restore it to health, if you manage to do it at all.

It seems easy to import engineers right now, but it won't always be so. There was that story about Hemingway asking a man how he went bankrupt - the reply was "I went bankrupt slowly and then all of a sudden". I think the cheap availability of talent is what masks the destruction of this profession, and I think the US could very quickly find itself in an very bad position.

I think that ensuring a healthy, engaged, optimistic domestic pipeline of engineers should be a top priority for the US, and our policies seem to be giving us the oppposite (by the way, a healthy percentage of international students and practitioners enhances this, the problem is when the US interest starts to plummet to dangerous levels).