I'm just playing the other side here:
Current unemployment for people with college degrees is extremely low. 4% or 5% is generally considered "full" employment. We are currently running at only 2.2% unemployment for college educated workers.
Unemployment level of college educated workers
The labor market for skilled labor is therefore, extremely tight.
There are plenty of places in America with Help Wanted signs for highly skilled workers.
The problem is that we have lots of unemployed unskilled workers. These unskilled workers are unable to fill those jobs and thus we are stuck. That's where the need for immigrants comes in.
Immigrants who come to this country legally in order to either educate themselves of their children are far more likely to open up businesses and invent new products.
If you take a look at the list of American inventors that were immigrants, it's astounding. We need these innovators to move our economy forward.
My dad used to work for an engineering firm that was started by a pair of Indian immigrants. Immigrants often create jobs rather than "steal" them from native born Americans. Claiming that immigrants are stealing American jobs and working for pennies is nothing more than Xenophobia.
My problem with the current immigration system is that we are too restrictive towards intelligent, hardworking, entrepenuerial, legal immigrants and far too lenient with illegal immigrants. We need to shut down the Mexican border tonight and at the same time open up our country to skilled workers.
If you actually read Mayor Bloomberg's speech, he says quite clearly that we need to improve our education system to better deal with foreign competition and that currently we are failing our children. If we can improve the American education system to the point where we can actually compete with the rest of the world, we won't have to import more skilled workers to fill the void.
Just my 2 cents...