I was born in NC, and I mostly have experienced the large amount of immigration as a positive. Most of the people I grew up were virulently anti-intellectuals, mocking math and science learning, and most of them have gone on to be realtors and business folks, bankers even. All the people I've met from China or South Asia (the two demographics I work most closely worth) value learning and science and math - not as some "lets have STEM summer camps" but when they meet some new 8 year old will ask them to solve some math problems (like precisely 1 of my kids' dozens of relatives).

I enjoy meeting the very smart people from all sorts of backgrounds - they share the values of education and hard work that my parents emphasized, and they have an appreciation for what we enjoy as software engineers; US born folks tend to have a bit of entitlement, and want success without hard work.

I interview a fair number of people, and truly first rate minds are a limited resource - there's just so many in each city (and not everyone will want to or be able to move for a career). Even with "off-shoring" one finds after hiring in a given city for a while, it gets harder, and the efficient thing to do is to open a branch in a new city.

I don't know, perhaps the realtors from my class get more money than many scientists or engineers, and certainly more than my peers in India (whose salaries have gone from 10% of mine to about 40% of mine in the past decade or two), but the point is the real love of solving novel problems - in an industry where success leads to many novel problems.

Hard work, interesting problems, and building things that actual people use - these are the core value prop for software engineering as a career; the money is pretty new and not the core; finding people who share that perspective is priceless. Enough money to provide a good start to your children and help your family is good, but never the heart of the matter.