> Nor is there anything to imply that the US education system has the ability to produce them.

Are you serious? Maybe you mean has the capacity or willing students or something?

Because if you're saying US education is somehow inferior to Asia or whatever, then you have been misled. US schools produce exactly what US firms demand of their graduates. Industry quite literally sets the demands for degrees in engineering. Asian education is memorization and rote practice. If that actually worked for students other than the top 1 percent or so who will excel in any system anyway, we'd do it too as it's so damn easy to teach that way.

I am going by the claims in the article, which are very specific about how China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers skilled in this particular discipline than the US. Perhaps the US education system is capable of it, if it tried. (Actually, almost certainly the US is capable of it, there's nothing about geography or ethnicity or law to prevent it.) But the US does not, nonetheless.

It seems a lot of people are discussing something which is related to immigration but not related to the topic of the article.

>China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers

This is baffling. The article is lamenting the fact that industry has been outsourced. There are few American engineers because there are so few American engineering jobs left. The American education system produced something like half of all new technology in the 20th century. Americans are obviously not less capable of being engineers than Chinese people.

  the claims in the article, which are very specific

Hardly. Their entire research for that content in this article is just offhand comments by Apple executives -- the most biased possible source.