I don't think you are coming into this discussion with opinions based on facts because I do not believe you bothered searching for them. You already have preconceived ideas - US universities are running a gigantic coordinated conspiracy to lockout American nationals from science and hire only foreign nationals.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most STEM faculty are hyper-ambitious people who care about grant funding and their h-indexes above almost everything else. Secondly, the funding scenario makes it much easier to recruit US nationals over foreign citizens.
Most US universities desperately want to hire US nationals for their doctoral programs; it's cheaper and more grants are available (as many DoD/DoE projects require US nationals due to export control restrictions). During my grad school days earlier in the last decade, almost all US citizen Ph.D. students were on some national fellowship, such as NSF, NDSEG, SCGSR, or EGRC. As a result, their stipends were $10,000 more than mine. And due to these fellowships, they were free for their Ph.D. advisors, while I cost my advisor $65,000 per annum. Despite these scholarships, that we have to admit so many foreign nationals paint the correct picture of the ground reality - the US doctoral STEM pipeline is really narrow.
Part of this is plain numbers - India and China have 7-8 times more people than the US does. And in the college-going age, it's an even more significant gap, as the fertility rate in the US fell below the replacement level many decades back. The second factor is the cost of education in the US. However, it's screamed about more than it really is an issue. The largest STEM educators in the nation are all public schools, where in-state tuition rates are still reasonable, and a full degree costs less than $50,000. Still, college tuition is a significant problem, and we should solve it. At the very least, it will expand the pipeline quite a bit, but not, in my opinion, enough to fill the gap.
Honest question - have you talked with any US universities' graduate program officers rather than spouting off Steve Bannon's conspiracies.? You think your points look smart, but I know what it is - uninformed ramblings since I know the ground reality.
ASML and TSMC are running almost exclusively today by US trained people. The fact that the United States trained them and lost them - is a point of deep concern. And people like you will prolong this crisis through misguided xenophobia rather than contributing to a meaningful solution.
