Perspective from a one time completely legal immigrant (:-)) and now US citizen:
I agree family conditions, etc., seem more crucial in buying a house than a green card. I know many people who bought houses while on a H1-B. The downside of being on a H1-B is that if you are laid-off you got to find a job right then. So some people prefer to wait till they get their green-card to buy a house. The reason being you may have to move to some other state for a job, whereas with a green-card you have the luxury of sticking around longer and trying to find a job in the same location.
As some one else mentioned, this “making everyone current” also happens on a regular basis. It’s nothing new.
As a person who has hired many engineers, US and foreigners, I can say that at least at our company we offer the same kind of initial wages for everyone. The only thing is that we know H1-Bs will stick around longer than Americans due to green-card reasons. Also having a bigger pool of engineers depresses the wages for *everyone*. So the biggies like Microsoft are big time supporters of foreign engineers. Otherwise their costs of hiring will be much higher. Note that for this same reason the IEEE is always clamoring to shut off foreign engineers.
In my experience I have noticed about the same level of talent in both native and foreign engineers. The problem seems more that Americans seem not too much interested in engineering careers.
