The Wall Street Journal has another article on immigration, entitled, tellingly enough, “Washington’s New Twist on Human Sacrifice.”  The sacrifice?  Sending away foreign students who’ve graduated from our colleges and universities, rather than making it easy for them to stay.  And maybe naturalize.

The WSJ, among other things, provided a list of immigration bills that have failed passage:

• Stopping Trained in America PhDs from Leaving the Economy Act
• Advanced Degree Visa Bill
• Startup Act
• Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship in America Act
• Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes Act

And the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Jobs Act, proposed this year by Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX), which treatment in Congress was typical.  This bill would have granted visas to graduates from qualifying universities in the hard sciences instead of the current program, a lottery for a limited numbers of visas, with the limits based on national origin. As Congressman Smith said,

Unfortunately, the Democrats voted today [20 Sep 12] to send the best and brightest foreign graduates back home to work for our global competitors.

And there’s this, a bit ago, from Steve Jobs on conversations he and a group of Silicon Valley execs he’d put together had with Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama:

The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done.  It infuriates me.

What’s up with all this obstruction?  Do we want immigration and immigrants, or do we not?  Progressives oppose school/education reform, and they oppose steps to welcome trained, talented, intelligent folks from other countries into our nation.  What’s up with that?

If Progressives put as much energy into doing things as they do to blocking them, we’d be a whole lot better off today, three years after the “end” of the Panic of 2008.