President Obama thrust immigration back into the spotlight last week with his executive order halting deportations for certain young illegal immigrants. In the context of America's jobs crisis, however, this is the wrong immigration issue to focus on. Our most pressing immigration problem marched across platforms at American colleges and universities in recent weeks—skilled foreign-born graduates whom we do not adequately incentivize to stay and work here.

At the Tuck School's graduation ceremony this month, I proudly read the names of 277 M.B.A. graduates. The Tuck class of 2012 was 35% foreign-born, representing countries from Australia to Zimbabwe. Many of these graduates chose Tuck over peer schools abroad because they aimed to apply their world-class U.S. education in the U.S. labor market. The same is true across academic fields. Today nearly 42% of all U.S. doctorate-level science and engineering workers are foreign-born.

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These five graduates exemplify the worrisome reality that America's attractiveness is waning for talented immigrants from dynamic countries. In the past decade, the share of doctoral-degree recipients in science and engineering from China and India who report definite plans to stay in America has been falling. A recent survey by Duke University researcher Vivek Wadwha found that 72% of Indian immigrants who returned to their home country said that opportunities to start their own businesses were "better" or "much better" there than in the U.S. For Chinese immigrant returnees, the figure was an alarming 81%.

Reshaping a time-worn narrative isn't easy. Social revolutions rarely are, especially when you're a woman trying to break into the boys' club that is Silicon Valley.

But an emerging class of early-stage tech start-up executives is helping dispel the notion that there isn't a leading role for them in the male-dominated valley. Company founders and leaders are coming out of Google, Salesforce.com and elsewhere for the excitement of shaping a young business.

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Five years ago, starting and funding a female-led tech company would have been a formidable task, says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. But, today, women are helping each other through groups such as Women Who Code, Astia and Girls in Tech, and some venture capitalists are warming up to backing companies led by women.

KURT VONNEGUT wrote that: “In every big transaction, there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on.” Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No alert lawyer takes only “a little”.

Consider the shark-munched world of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). In 2005, 39% of M&A deals were challenged by lawsuits, one study found. By 2011 a hefty 96% of acquisitions worth more than $500m were attracting suits, according to Robert Daines of Stanford University (who spotted the Vonnegut quote) and Olga Koumrian of Cornerstone, a consultancy. Each deal was hit by an average of 6.2 lawsuits. Many were filed within hours of the deal’s announcement; 65% within two weeks.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers insist that the process can be healthy—a view with which Mr Daines has some sympathy. Those representing shareholders of the company being bought typically sue for more money, better terms or more disclosure. Sometimes light is shed on a murky process: plaintiffs won $89.4m when they challenged the purchase of Del Monte, a food company, by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a private-equity firm. (Barclays, the investment bank involved, was accused of a conflict of interest.)

At Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg was a superstar student, a computer prodigy able, in his spare time, to bang out the lines of code that would become Facebook, a transformational company that in eight years has changed the world.

But in his first big test as a CEO—Facebook’s initial public offering of stock—the baby-faced 28-year-old flunk-ed, and badly. Worse, in the wake of this overhyped and poorly managed stock deal, the guy in charge was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t do interviews, or even make a statement.

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None of this is the right image for a company that is trying to convince 900 million users that it can be trusted with their personal information. “I have no doubt that this is going to hurt their business,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a research fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School. “Facebook has gone from being a darling to being a villain. Zuckerberg went from being seen as this child-genius rock star to being seen as a thief. People have lost their savings.” (Part of Wadhwa’s research at Stanford involves developing ethical guidelines for startups, “so we can educate people like Zuckerberg before they learn the hard way,” he says.)

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This pressure is likely to tempt the company to use the one tool it has for reliably monetizing: data. Lots of it. The IPO disaster simply creates an incentive to pry even deeper into the lives of users, “the one thing people hate most,” Wadhwa says. Facebook can track people even when they’re not on the site, watching where they go and what they do. That information, sliced and analyzed the right way, could be of great value to advertisers.

In the 1990s, Pooja Sankar was a shy girl growing up in Patna. She was taught to stay away from boys, which made her years at the boys-infested IIT Kanpur a lonely battle. Sankar, who found programming just as hard as making friends, studied alone; she was too shy to ask her male classmates for help.

Haunted by that experience, in January 2011, Sankar launched Piazza, an interactive website that allows students to ask, explore and answer all kinds of questions under the guidance of their instructors. Her startup already has 200,000 users, and the backing of Silicon Valley movers and shakers like Ron Conway and Mitch Kapor. "Who I am today is all because I was a shy girl in India," she says.

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"Indian women think out of the box because they have struggled so much, unlike most entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who think like each other and develop similar stupid solutions like each other," says Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur-turnedacademic , and a vocal voice in the Valley on female entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, who teaches at Duke and Stanford, explains how the social skills gained in college actually help Americans get ahead.

Even as he apologized for a $2 billion trading loss, shareholders approved JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's $23 million pay package Tuesday at the bank's annual meeting.

The meeting comes just days after the bank disclosed the massive trading loss, an event that led to the departure of its chief investment officer and forced its CEO to repeatedly apologize for the bank's actions.

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F. Daniel Siciliano, a professor at Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, predicted on Monday that "fireworks are likely to be modest" at the JPMorgan meeting.

That's because Tampa is an out-of-the-way location, and many shareholder votes have already been cast.

"In theory, people can change their votes on their proxy," Siciliano said. "But by and large, mechanically, that tends to not happen."

Even as he apologized for a $2 billion trading loss, shareholders approved JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's $23 million pay package Tuesday at the bank's annual meeting.

The meeting comes just days after the bank disclosed the massive trading loss, an event that led to the departure of its chief investment officer and forced its CEO to repeatedly apologize for the bank's actions.

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F. Daniel Siciliano, a professor at Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, predicted on Monday that "fireworks are likely to be modest" at the JPMorgan meeting.

That's because Tampa is an out-of-the-way location, and many shareholder votes have already been cast.

"In theory, people can change their votes on their proxy," Siciliano said. "But by and large, mechanically, that tends to not happen."

The investigative report that Best Buy directors received over the weekend presented them with their second sensitive personnel situation in just a couple of months.

First they'd learned of what the report called an "inappropriate relationship" involving CEO Brian Dunn, leading to his April departure. Now they faced a situation that was in some ways even trickier: a report that reflected badly on company founder Richard Schulze, the man who has led Best Buy in one capacity or another for nearly half a century.

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F. Daniel Siciliano, a law professor and head of Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, said Schulze's departure was a "very good sign" that corporate governance is being taken seriously by the company's independent directors, who asserted their power.

"The board acted pretty quickly and decisively about the chair's coverup," Siciliano said. "That behavior is more clearly inappropriate than the CEO's behavior. Sitting on an allegation? There is no real excuse."

In this edition of Need to Know, the program explores the debate about legal immigration.

First: should the government make it easier for foreign-born, hi-tech workers to stay in the United States, as companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft argue? Or are these workers already undercutting the job market for Americans? Need to Know’s Rick Karr travels to Silicon Valley and to New York City to investigate.