I’ve been hearing about this for decades. It keeps happening because republicans need their cheap labor and democrats need foreign voters. The people in power have tremendous political incentives to keep the pipeline flowing.

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There are a lot of errors in that article. Like line 1, the idea that foreign students get jobs before Americans do. Quite the opposite in real life. Go to any school, and see the employment rates in that school for US vs foreign students.

Also H1B pays FICA taxes, that exemption is only for OPT. The OPT exemption can be easily removed.

>The percentage of computer science graduates ... For those who specialized in computer programming,

Isn't computer programing all of computer science. This seems like a weird distinction to make?

The job market just seems to suck, if it didnt i dont think things like this would come up. I dont think immigration is the reason for the job market sucking. theres no jobs to apply to, theres no jobs to take from americans in the first place

Soham got 5 jobs. More than 5 jobs... He kept them for a while too.

We didn't lie to comp sci grads, they have the skills to DO the job, but the interview is a whole other skill that they have to learn. There is a gauntlet to be run of goofy interview questions and qualifiers. I dont know any one in the last few years who hasn't gone back to leetcode and the like to brush up if they needed to look.

Then you get posts like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079183

https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-...

Staff doing nothing or not pulling their weight is far more common than people think. Managers are resistant to firing staff, not because of HR, or emotional reasons. Rather many of them don't want to deal with the judgement of their peers (why did you make the bad hire to start with), and the judgement of their team/group. Office politics at the director level and above in a large organization is BRUTAL.

I don’t understand why we care if foreign born individuals are coding out software. We all use foreign written code daily.

Any student will look at the job prospects of their major before selecting it. We aren’t lying to them. I won’t feel bad for a student fresh out of college that “only” received a job offer for 95k, when that’s above the US median household income. I’m skeptical the lower job placement rate is due to H1B, and it might be more related to larger labor market trends.

“eliminate the STEM OPT extension”

I won’t get into h1b which gets plenty of air time, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone wanting to eliminate OPT. This is beyond idiotic. Foreigners come and get educated in the US; if we didn’t have OPT they’d have to go back to their home country and contribute there. Instead with OPT we give them a chance to integrate into American companies, making the US more competitive as a whole. This is a massive strategic advantage. Places like MIT/CalTech/CMU are heavily made up of foreigners. We need the best and brightest minds from the world; only pulling from 350M vs 8B is a giant mistake.

It seems to miss foreign students?

This is using statistics to tell a preconceived story. Underlying this a notion that foreign workers are simply “imported” like they are dug out of the ground or something. How do these STEM OPT people find jobs? Guess what. They interview like everyone else does.

1: Every big tech interview I have been in the visa status is not even a question in the interview process. There is just a simple gate that “can you legally work in the US”? The hiring committee is not even thinking about visa (that’s a HR problem)

2: Are there confounders in that foreign workers are less likely to negotiate? Absolutely.

3: are there confounders in that people who come to US for study are likely already a self selected bunch who are striving to succeed? What are the typical grade distributions between foreign STEM students and US STEM students? Is grade a confounding variable? What happens if we control for GPA?

And finally does H1B abuse happen? Absolutely.

There is a lot of nuance that are not captured by surface level statistics. But nuance does not make outrage.

I applaud the courage to call out this as a problem. With that said I believe that there is a lot more nuance on this issue than the article is willing to provide, or more importantly research needed to be done to be rigorous on this topic. There definitely is some truth here about the H1B1 program in the job market. There are some companies who are absolutely shameless abusers too. I think that all of us working in the industry know that a comp sci degree alone is not enough to provide the training for many of these roles.

As an aside, I think there's another equally important issue that should also be raised along with employment. A large number of our graduate+ degrees in STEM go to foreign nationals. The issue is not providing education to foreign nationals in and of itself, but that many of these degrees (public schools) are funded by tax payers, and we are depriving our country of an educated population while educating citizens in other countries who compete with our country globally. Private schools can and should do whatever is in their mission, but public schools should have some accountability to our citizens and tax payers. We all have a right to get value for the money that we put into things like our public university system, which is supposed to be training future leaders of our country.

Of course with that longwinded answer I have to say... Tech is like the weather, just wait for a minute its all going to change anyway, so don't stress all of this.

"How the American engineering degree, sold as a solid ticket to the American dream, has become less solid for recent graduates trying to find that first job."

As opposed to what? All the other recent graduates with non-engineering degrees who are drowning in job offers? It's tough out here for everyone. This kind of hyperbole doesn't help.

"How the American engineering degree, sold as a solid ticket to the American dream"

It wasn't "sold" as though there were some cigarette smoking ad men behind it. People went after _software_ engineering degrees when they saw a bunch of 20 year olds in Mountain View with 6 figure incomes. The other branches of engineering have always been hit or miss.

And "American Dream" - really? Has anyone used that term unironically since The Great Gatsby came out?

"We need to stop pretending that flooding the labor market with foreign workers is somehow beneficial to American students."

I do not think anyone is making that point. Clearly a gated and scarce employee pool is always in the advantage of the employee.

You can agree or not, but the point is expanded availability of highly skilled labor from CS Graduates benefits the US companies hiring them, not just by removing some scarcity in the supply, but also having an expanded talent pool increases quality available.

From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry, or have them starting and staffing competition in their home countries? "Brain drain" fueled by unlimited reserve currency dollars is very real.

Lastly, those non-US graduates pay a very hefty sum for the 'privilege' of attending school in the US. Having worked with academics from around the globe, including US, I can state with some certainty the US degree courses are not qualitatively very different from what is available elsewhere at a fraction of the cost (US education costs are insane!). But they do carry the implicit promise of an easyer way to higher paying US jobs.

So all in all, everyone in the US benefits from the system, except the lower 66th percentile of native US CS graduates.

> That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma.

This is such a weird phrasing. These people are not "guaranteed" jobs. They get a job and then apply for a visa which is granted because they have offer letters. In fact the whole article reads like American government is somehow giving these people jobs rather than allowing them to work on jobs they have already gotten.

The most uncharitable reading of this is usual racist dog whistle.

> That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs ...

Guaranteed jobs? Sir, this is not France ;)

yup, trying to unionize with H1B workers nearly impossible as well as a majority of them feel this will threaten their sponsorship/visa.

The wage suppression is real.

A slightly different take:

The key information is halfway down the page, in the figure that shows the number of new graduates and new temporary workers each year. The number of new temporary workers has been relatively stable, while the number of new graduates has been climbing steadily.

There was a shortage of software developers in the 2010s. The industry hired more people from abroad than there were graduates from CS programs. Still, CS graduates had better job prospects than their peers in other fields. The market responded to the shortage by increasing the supply of CS graduates, and that increase in domestic supply kept entry-level wages from rising faster than inflation.

The job market changed in the 2020s. A country with a more reactive immigration policy would have noticed the worsening job prospects of new graduates and routinely lowered the supply of new immigrant workers in that field. The US could not do that, as American legislators apparently don't believe in such central planning. The government can make employment-based immigration easier or harder overall, but it lacks convenient tools for targeted interventions in specific fields.

People who chose CS when the job market was hot are now graduating in record numbers. You could say in retrospect that the market overreacted and allocated too much resources to software. And it's quite likely that the market will now overreact in the other direction, as it did after the dot-com bust. Immigration policy can help smoothen these market overreactions, as you can get immigrant workers much faster than new graduates. But that requires dedicated effort from the government.

Alarming statistics … many big companies also set up so-called engineering centers outside of the US and ship IT works there, often sidelining talent they already have in the US. Combining these practices, it would not be surprising the same happened to manufacturing will happen to many other professions.

> Let that sink in: Half of our computer programming graduates are not in full-time jobs within six months of graduation. In the supposed golden age of technology, when every company claims to be desperately seeking tech talent, half of our trained programmers still need work.

Is this author suggesting that a CS degree is equivalent to programmer training?

Just price the H1B properly. 300K/year per visa from the company to the government adjusted for inflation. This will make sure that only the cream of the crop will come.