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If someone wants to come to the USA on their own volition, and take their oath of citizenship- fantastic!

Except they can't - it's quite difficult for someone to do so without an employment or marriage relationship, and even after someone has a green card they are required to wait several years before an application for citizenship will even be considered.

Railroads in the 1890's didn't suddenly wake up with a million trained workers at their disposal, and they didn't have the option of importing trained workers from the UK where railroads were booming.

Why do you think there are so many Chinese people on the West coast of the USA? As well as those who arrived to dig for gold int he 1850s, a great deal of railroad construction was done with imported Chinese labor starting in the 1860s; both to relieve the labor shortage in the railroad industry and because they were cheaper and better-behaved than Irish laborers. If you're in the Bay Area the Oakland Museum of California has a permanent exhibit dedicated to this.

I am of course in favor of more training but you seem to be under the impression that the US railroad industry bootstrapped itself, when in fact it was heavily reliant on immigrant labor from the outset.

Uh....most railroad workers were immigrants.

I get your point but that probably wasn't the best example.

No- you're thinking of the railroad builders (1860's-1870's). By 1900, when the railroads were into their big boom, most of the imported construction workers had either become citizens or given birth to the next generation, who were citizens.

I guess should have clarified that I meant the engineers, brakemen, locomotive builders, and mechanics, and not the well-known Chinese and Irish immigrants who made up the workforce building west.

>>Fast food restaurants don't get to import the best burger-slingers from Germany. Software companies have to live in the same space.

I don't agree with this. The tech industry is beautiful & far-reaching in large part because it doesn't have the restrictions of proximity to the degree of many other industries. I would hate to see artificial limits placed on it to force the same conditions as traditional Brick and mortar businesses.

You mean like, say, clothing or electronics manufacture, in which conditions for workers are a global race to the bottom?

I wish I had a counter-argument to why this wouldn't happen with the software engineering industry. My gut feeling tells me it can't happen, but I have no data.

Fast food restaurants don't get to import the best burger-slingers from Germany.

But we don't export burgers to Germany. If we wanted to export burgers all over the world then we'd have to bring the world's best burger-slingers over here first.

". . . it is not up to corporations to dictate terms of citizenship at their convenience."

Of course not. But it is up to legislators to make decisions that are in the best interests of the U.S. going forward. An enlightened view of that might, as P.G. suggests, include allowing more programmers to come to U.S. To suggest that programmers are somehow analogous to fast-food workers is seriously misguided.

It will never be in the best interests of the United States to admit anyone into the country to please the desires of the stock market or of large corporations or of wealthy venture capitalists.

There is nothing, other than a modicum of education, that separates a talented software engineer from a talented fast food worker. I've seen plenty of engineers who I'd never trust with a burger or a grill.