Right-wing opponents of immigration and of what they called “amnesty” for illegals weren’t the only ones celebrating last month’s defeat of the White House-backed immigration bill.

In 2002 I was naïve enough to write a column channeling the angst of technology CEOs about the “shortage” of scientists and engineers (a theme that has been sounded since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation projected a shortfall of about 675,000 over the following two decades, something that never materialized, as discussed in a paper by MIT mathematician Eric Weinstein). Scores of engineers, in particular, wrote to me. In addition to pointing out my basic stupidity (well, credulity), they explained that the career prospects of an engineer these days are so bleak they steer their children away from the field. Most of all, they argued that the shortage is and was a myth.

No wonder, then, that engineers are cheering the defeat of the immigration bill, which would have increased the number of high-tech employees that companies could bring in on temporary H-1B visas from the current 65,000 per year to 115,000 and eventually to as many as 180,000.