Well, yes, the argument is ludicrous; but I have a purely speculative idea of where it might come from.
I've often argued strictly against government support of college education. This is a complex and confusing concept that's difficult to understand even when explained well, and I don't intend for you to understand it implicitly from a few quick sentences; but, in brief, providing government-backed loans or tax-funded college places an enormous amount of risk and responsibility on the individual, while doing no such thing leaves businesses suffering for skilled labor unless they take on a minuscule amount of risk and shoulder the responsibility of building the workforce. I'll expand on this briefly, although, again, not in great economic detail, so you might not find that argument in and of itself convincing; however, I'm sure you'll get the framework, and you'll see easily how it could lead to such backwards beliefs as businesses requiring foreign workers to create jobs for Americans.
I'm sure you understand what it's like being a self-propelled student. Through government loan programs and tax-funded college, you get to select a career and put yourself through school. You probably didn't have a guaranteed job lined up in 4 years: you had to look at the market, guess what would be a popular job when you graduate, and take that career. You might have taken a career in something you already enjoyed, instead of bothering with something you had a solid plan to make money from--liberal arts majors and computer programmers both do this, albeit programmers and engineers and scientists are more inclined to think themselves more hireable than liberal arts majors. Through all of this, you faced great risks: what if the market didn't expand, or if everyone else took the same degree you did? 74% of STEM degree holders don't work in STEM fields at all, and there's plenty of unemployment and long months or years from graduation to employment.
As a self-propelled student, you are a tool. If you don't go to college, a bunch of other tools get degrees, and you get passed over by businesses. You don't get hired, and you don't get a job. Because you could put yourself through college, you are expected to; and then you face the hiring process by which businesses put up an urgent need for a candidate, interview 30 or 50 people, grind down the salaries, fire anyone they hire and decide isn't enough of a cog in the machine, and so forth. You are given the greatest responsibility, the highest demands, and the lowest chance of success.
My argument against this, and the key to understanding where this confusion of ideas about needing foreign workers to create American jobs may have honestly come from, is in the alternative: We supply zero college education support, and only focus on K-12 education. If that were done, we'd quickly run out of educated, skilled professionals: businesses would run out of candidates to hire. This paralyzes businesses, preventing them from achieving strategic goals by constricting their staffing. Because you, the individual, can't put yourself through college, all the employers seeking to hire someone in some field you'd like to enter are experiencing the great pain of needing you, but not being able to hire you.
There's one way out of this. The business naturally projects 2-3 years ahead and budgets which positions it will fill well before they start the application process; instead, they would have to project 2-3 years ahead and start hiring entrants. The moment you hire a new entrant, a high-school graduate most likely, you start training them. Menial, easy, low-skill work--fetching legal briefs, assembling prototypes, writing down measurements, source code bug hunting--can propagate down to these cheap entrants as a means of moving time-intensive, skill-non-intensive work from expensive, highly-skilled professionals. This provides immediate returns to the business, who meanwhile augments your paltry $40,000/year salary with $20,000/year of college education. Four years later, you're a $75,000/year professional working for the business, raised by them, cared for by them, clung to as one of their valuable and *expensive* assets, and very much needed for the job you've been groomed into.
That's the crux of it.
Businesses today don't know how to strategically build a workforce. They don't know how to find someone with promise, bring them on board, and develop them into the skilled professional they need. The only thing businesses know how to do is send people to 5-day bootcamp training for SQL Server 2013--provided they're already skilled, experienced DBAs with experience using SQL Server 2010--and hire people with the degrees and experience needed to fit the job. They know how to file the edge of the gear a bit, or fit a new gear; they don't know how to cast a brand new gear from raw materials.
It is believed, by businesses and politicians, that you can't build a giant new department ready to hire 5000 new employees unless you have the 100 skilled workers required to run the damn thing in the first place. For those skeletal crews, they want to hire immediate rock-star hero engineers, and they can't find precisely what they want; rather than grooming their current employees into the skills needed, they reach across the sea and call in some warm bodies from Germany or India for their impressive credentials, thinking they'll do better.
They may actually believe Americans don't have and can't acquire the skills needed, because they don't understand how to take the social responsibility to build the workforce. This is wholly wrong-headed thinking, but these are wholly bewildered people who think it's their god-given right to have an endless field of skilled labor for them to pick from without investing a damn thing in the development of that labor.
