Just came across some more evidence in a wapo article today. Bannon opposing immigration for highly educated students says: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...
Wanting to limit immigration doesn't make you racist, though. I take it as saying, essentially, if such a significant percentage of jobs in a top industry in this country are held by immigrants, are we maybe not doing enough to help our own residents in need of good paying jobs to be able to acquire these positions?
A CEO of a large software company is more than just a "good paying job" for Joe Sixpack over here. It requires experience, education, intuition - it's an incredibly unique position. It's not the kind of thing that you can just go to school for or train in some government New Deal program an then come out with six offers. What Bannon is speaking to isn't about helping the little guy get jobs, it's about getting 'Americans' (see: white) to be in these positions of powers.
Let me preface by stating that these are vague, short statements that we are trying to use to extrapolate to some fairly large assertions, and we all come into them with a bias and interpret them based on those biases.
That said, the way I interpreted the CEO statement was that it is symbolic of the depth of penetration of immigrants in the tech labor pool. If that large a percentage of CEOs are immigrants, imagine the numbers from the top to the bottom of the org charts. None of these CEO jobs are going to people straight out of college, they are working their way through the industry.
I've been in this industry for 20 years, at all levels. I haven't seen too many entry level positions that Americans can't be easily trained for, yet there is a nonstop push to massively increase annual H1B limits. At some point, someone has to ask why we can't fill that need with the people we have.
No doubt immigrants would still likely be over-represented at the higher echelons because a person willing to move across the world likely has more drive to get there, but it still seems like we should feel a civic duty to use what we can from home before increasing the numbers coming in.