Actually, Reagan got some guy a job back in the '80s, after he wrote a highly-publicized letter asking him to do so. The guy later got laid off.

Even a superficial look would tell you that conservatives are pretty divided on this issue with harsh language used on each sides towards the other. McCain, Jeb and GW Bush and the editors of the WSJ strongly and consistently favor legal highly-skilled immigration.

From Mitt Romney's Believe in America campaign document:

"As president, a first step that Mitt Romney will take along these lines is to raise
the ceiling on the number of visas issued to holders of advanced degrees in math,
science, and engineering who have job offers in those fields from U.S. companies."

"As president, Mitt Romney will also work to establish a policy that staples a
green card to the diploma of every eligible student visa holder who graduates from
one of our universities with an advanced degree in math, science, or engineering.

Romney doesn't "Believe In America" He believes in Asian Imports. As if the richest country on the planet with 300 million people can't train up enough scientists and engineers.

This is a sop to Romney's Crony Capitalist pals in Silicon Valley and Wall Street who want a cheap, compliant labor force. Existing H-1B saturation has tens of thousands of native born American technologists pounding the pavement in a tanked economy. Yet Romney's solution is to suck in even more immigrants, 98% of which are nothing special and no more competent than the Americans they displace.

Moreover, both Romney and Obama call for more Americans to study science and engineering. Yet what's the incentive for an American kid to bust his or her hump in a tough academic program when they know they'll be competing for jobs against Asians who will work as indentured servants for a Green Card?

BTW, notice that the talking heads and politicians who call for almost unfettered technologist immigration conveniently have positions where they themselves won't be"insourced" out of job via the same mechanisms.

Entry level engineers of Chinese and Indian origin are finding better and better salaries back home - when we hire a foreign grad in the US it is for the same rate we would pay a US native. There is little savings on direct labor costs anymore. Already top technical talent in India/China is commanding salaries on par with US ones. Like any other groups, there are good ones and not so good ones, but adding them into the labor pool only increases the talent level from which I choose. Sometimes I want an Indian or Chinese employee in order to better communicate with our locations in India and China, so a US candidate is actually not wanted.

There will always be some playing the wage game but increasingly, talent will get paid wherever it is and what ever nationality it is. We had a very nice run of being protected from the rest of the world, but those days are gone. And to the betterment of us all as US based companies are quickly demonstrating their superiority over most of their foreign competitors and are now laying down facilties in developing countries in order to service those markets, not necessarily for import back to the US.

Whoever screens these comments is sensitive to liberal comments. No swearing, no threats, no false claims, no insults (out of kind), no run-on writing. Just snark for snark. You can dish it out but you can't take it.

Conservative cowards all (this is an out of kind insult).

After college, a neighbor of mine moved from his little town halfway across the country to a big city to get a high-skilled tech job (the traditional way that smart kids from humble families have latched on to the middle class during the last several decades).

Jobs like that are thin on the ground in his hometown, but one opened up a few years ago and he applied. He was told he was their "second choice," their first choice being an H-1B contractor who they rebadged as an employee and even helped adjust his status to permanent.

So instead of my neighbor working near and enjoying his extended family, he keeps working 800 miles away while another guy from half a world away gets to live in and enjoy his hometown.

There are some minimum benefits that citizenship had better start conferring, and being first in line for jobs for which they are well-qualified is one that's pretty fundamental.

I retired from Silicon Valley a few years ago, for the last twenty years I was a headhunter. I have very mixed feelings about the H1B program.
On the positive side, if we didn't have the ability to hire foreign engineers, Si Valley would have never grown the way it did. The demand for engineers and scientists far exceeded the supply of US citizens with even close to the education or experience needed. A case in point: one of my sons graduated from a bay area university with a BS EE. He was one of only about three US citizens in his graduating class of EEs. Having looked at literally thousands of resumes of new graduate engineers I can reasonably infer that his school was not an exception. It is clear to me that the secondary education system in our country is failing to produce kids who can or want to pursue careers in science or engineering. Returning to my son's case, he dropped out of High School and joined the Army that experience got his started down a technical path. The crushing boredom of a US school system catering to the lowest common denominator does not produce people who can or will think outside the box.
The negative side of the H1B program is that by its success, it has depressed salaries (not to the degree claimed by some) and has produced a huge number of technical managers and executives not of US origin. The largest problem there is that people hire people like themselves: Indian managers hire Indian engineers. So we now have a built in prejudice against US grown engineers.
How do we get ourselves out of this mess? Yes, we have to greatly curtail the H1B program. Were I a pessimist, looking at the decimation of American industry in the last decade, I'd say we don't need engineers anyway, just keep producing marketers and bean counters. However, I choose to believe we'll get out of this funk and, once we kill Obamacare, the demands of medical technology alone can fuel an industrial recovery better than WW II did with somewhat less dire side effects. But where do the engineers and scientist come from? Companies and industries have to grow them themselves. It may require the legalization of some kind of indentured servitude to make it cost effective, but American industry has done it in the past -- I've known some very talented non-degreed engineers produced by the likes of Westinghouse and Honeywell.
Meanwhile if you are an out of work Engineer with more than 10 years of experience, stop applying for entry level (or 3-5 year exp) jobs. Stop reading 'How to write a killer resume' book. Stop surfing the internet all day every day and sending resumes for jobs you aren't an exact fit for. Instead, call everyone you know and everyone they know and cold call every potential employer you can find.

There's also the fact that just because someone gets laid off, whether or not it has anything to do with the quality of their work (It literally could be the companies failure), often puts up the red flag of which you speak and it becomes a spiral:

Person gets laid off
Companies wonder if he's not a great employee and don't hire him
Person now unemployed 6 months
Company: "Gosh, this guy got laid off AND he hasn't found another job in 6 months, he seems okay, but I gotta wonder about his work ethic"
Person now unemployed 1 year +
Company: "Gosh, this guy got laid off AND he hasn't found another job a year, something must be wrong with him"
etc., etc., etc.

A few years back, I was in a professional organization for, well, compute geeks. They had a weekly news digest. I remember one issue where the first story was about Microsoft lobbying congress to increase the number of visas for foreign workers. Microsoft needed more Indian programmers, they said, because US colleges just weren't graduating enough computer scientists anymore. The very next article was a report on a survey regarding why undergraduates weren't going into computer science anymore. By far the number one reason was that all the CS jobs were going overseas and they just didn't want to invest all that time and money in one of the toughest degrees any college offers, only to get out and not have a job. Draw you own conclusion.