>In fairness, the US has always done well harvesting the skills of foreign workers in pharmaceutical, chip design and other high-value services. Look at the quantity of patents researched in (say) Switzerland but owned by funding US interests and you'll see what I mean.
>
SNIP

Exactly. There was a suggestion in Michael's post that technical innovation, at least in the computer field, has been the work of native born Americans and the only reason others are competing with us now is we have "given them" our technology. What a laugh.

There is a fairly old joke that you have probably heard, which has a point to make besides being funny.

Q: What is the language of science?
A: Broken English.