I'd be interested in hearing Grove's thoughts on the H1B in light of his recent comments on the decline of tech in the US.
It's easy to be cynical about Grove and the other people who supported this program, but one thing I realize early was that the H1B looks incredibly different depending on who is using it. Intel probably just figured it was a way to hire people out of Stanford and Berkeley's engineering grad schools, and why on earth wouldn't you let someone do that? Other people, the ones who saw the body shops at work (or were part of those heavily coerced "knowledge transfer" programs) couldn't understand why anyone was defending the program at all.
Honestly, I do think that this program played a substantial role in the erosion of interest in graduate level science and engineering people who grew up in the US - not because it allowed talented people to come here (that is a good thing), but because it was expanded to such a scale that it allowed companies to hire people at all levels of the talent spectrum at wages that weren't competitive with other options outside tech (law, medicine, MBA).
I think it was difficult to detect this at first, because there was of course some inertia (older Americans still in the field, takes a while for younger Americans to change their behavior and start avoiding sci/eng grad programs). The problem is, there is inertia on the other side - if wages do improve, it'll take a long time for young Americans to respond the new market signals.
I hate this, because I had so many good friends in grad school who were from overseas, but it really disturbed me that kids who had grown up in California (or even the US) were almost totally absent from graduate engineering in a school called "The University of California"). The presence of international students is a great thing, but not when the levels of US citizens starts to drop to dangerous lows. And while Grove and others described this as a kind of crisis, they never really connected it with wage erosion or potential displacement from the visa programs.
I think this is a hidden factor that will become far more pronounced when demand for engineers from Asia increases. It's already happening, of course, but the US still gets to keep a lot of the talent that came here for grad school.
I think we should compete for this talent, of course, but I also think we should realize that will will not be a top tech power if we don't produce and sustain a healthy flow of engineering and science talent from our own population. So far, this isn't controversial - the disagreement comes from the extent to which visa programs add rather than displace.