Those areas are tech hubs. I've lived in Silicon Valley for 18 years, and most companies I've worked for are about half engineering. So, for every foreign engineer we bring in, perhaps the company can add one position on the other side of the house, in marketing, accounting, HR, etc. And then some small trickle-down effect as the engineer and his counterpart spend their salaries locally. It's good, better than nothing, but it's not like the old days of setting up a car factory and then bringing in thousands of relatively low-skilled new jobs.

The Halo example is good, but balance it out with things like Google's self driving cars. It's a relatively small team that will probably eliminate all of the taxi and truck driving jobs in the developed world. It will probably make vehicle sharing radically more efficient as well which will take a lot of cars off the road and eliminate more jobs there too.

All in all, I believe we're competing with foreign engineers no matter where they are so it makes sense to have them here. I'm just not seeing much evidence that we are creating jobs faster than we are eliminating them.