They walked off university campuses with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, hoping America’s companies would open their doors. It turned out a grim reality was waiting for them instead.
Over 500,000 American students graduate with STEM degrees every year, entering a job market advertised as stable and growing. On the other side of those graduates sits a lucrative visa system that encourages companies to hire foreigners over Americans.
There are as many as 730,000 H-1B visa workers and a little over half a million visa worker dependents as of January 2025, according to FWD.us, a pro-immigration group. Corporations and the visa’s advocates in Washington, D.C., have long-touted the program as a way to prevent offshoring and draw in the globe’s “best and brightest.”
“H-1B was designed to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers. All the stuff about [labor] shortages, global talent, was all gaslighting the public to sell a program that otherwise isn’t sellable,” John Miano, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
‘Clearly Just Displacing Americans’
The H-1B program allows employers to hire foreigners in specialty jobs that have skills they otherwise cannot obtain from American workers, according to the Department of Labor.
“Before this AI boom happened, for the past decade or so, you’ve got at least 400,000 American graduates getting STEM degrees, and fewer than half of them end up finding careers in STEM occupations,” Jeremy Beck, the co-president of NumbersUSA, the largest single-issue grassroots immigration reform organization, told the DCNF in an interview.
American tech workers have argued that companies use visa programs to replace them with cheaper foreign labor that undermines American wages.
“There is no need for a temporary labor gap. It is clearly just displacing Americans and exploiting foreign guest workers,” Beck said about the H-1B visa program.
Today, STEM graduates face even more pressures, with artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping a slew of industries.
Early-career employment in AI-exposed fields such as software development and customer service was 19% lower than in jobs with less AI-exposed jobs, per a study conducted by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. AI leads to reduced hiring of young workers instead of increased firings and the decline in employment occurs in positions where AI usage substitutes human work, whereas employment is steady or increasing in fields where AI use complements human work, per the study.
The average recent college graduate unemployment rate in June 2026 was 5.6%, while the rate for all college graduates sat at 2.9%, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
When broken down by degree, fed figures paint a grim picture for STEM graduates. The unemployment rate for computer science graduates’ sat at 7% in 2024, while 7.8% of computer engineering degree holders were unemployed. Other disciplines, like mathematics and information systems, showed a similarly high unemployment rate.
“Art history majors have a lower unemployment rate than computer science majors now,” Miano remarked.
Despite the initial higher unemployment rate, computer science and other-related majors were less likely than other majors to be underemployed and often had higher median earning potential both in the graduates’ early career and mid-career, Fed data shows. But that data doesn’t reflect reality for many young Americans, who have struggled to get their careers off the ground.
More than 7 million American natives with a STEM degree worked in a non-STEM job, according to a May Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report. Reducing “high-skill” immigration to about ten thousand “genuinely” exceptional candidates per year may allow native workers to fill the STEM gap in the labor market, the report argues.
Advocates believe that the H-1B program helps secure the best talent across the world and H-1B visa workers complement rather than replace domestic workers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Many of these proponents contend that H-1B visa restrictions incentivize offshoring overseas to countries such as Canada, China and India.
The H-1B program’s supporters have pushed “unsubstantiated claims that there is a significant shortage of STEM talent, which have been a running feature of STEM workforce policy discussions,” Howard University’s Ron Hira wrote in a 2022 article in Issues in Science and Technology, a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
For each additional H-1B visa a firm acquires, the firm crowds out 1.5 workers at the firm, Notre Dame University professor Kirk Doran found in 2022 paper. H-1B visa workers add “insignificant and at most modest effects on firm innovation,” the professor wrote.
H-1B isn’t the only program squeezing American workers.
The L-1 visa program allows companies to transfer employees, executives, and managers from a foreign office to a U.S. office, per the State Department. However, critics say there’s a massive loophole, as companies aren’t required to show that they couldn’t find talent in the domestic U.S., according to the Economic Policy Institute.
L-1 visas have gotten some attention from Washington, though no major overhauls to the program have actually been passed.
Two lawmakers, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, introduced the H–1B and L–1 Visa Reform Act of 2025. Their bill is currently sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Why put your family into debt to get a degree in one of these occupations when you know that the government is offering a financial incentive to employers to either not hire you in the first place or to push you out the door once you start making real money at that organization or in that occupation?,” Beck asked rhetorically.
‘A Historic Moment’
Many STEM graduates continue to look for work as many top tech companies hire foreign workers. Amazon ranks as the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas for fiscal year 2026, whereas Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle rank among the top ten recipients of H-1B workers, according to June Center for Immigration Services (CIS) data. The companies did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Vice President JD Vance in early October said the administration suspended Microsoft and Adobe from sponsoring H-1B visa workers for a permanent residency green card program, or the Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM), believing that they replace laid off domestic workers with foreign workers, per Axios.
“We’ve never had a sitting vice president so openly and publicly acknowledge what millions of Americans have come to learn over the last 30 years, which is that the H-1B program does indeed displace American workers and exploits the guest workers who are displacing them or replacing them,” Beck explained.
“Last year, Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas,” Vice President JD Vance said during a press conference announcing the suspension.
Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees Monday, which amounts to approximately 27% of its global workforce, as the tech giant spends billions of dollars on AI.
“For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign, indentured servants,” Vance added. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”
Microsoft responded to the administration’s suspension, saying that of the 6,000 H-1B visa applications submitted recently, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.
“These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country,” the company stated in a press release in early October.
“Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category. We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings. We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work,” the company added.
The White House tried to raise the price tag on H-1B visas, although the proposal has been tied down in the courts.
The Trump administration attempted to raise the H-1B fee to $100,000 from $5,000 for new visa holders, but an Obama-appointed judge struck down the proposed fee, per Forbes. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) reportedly has started approving H-1B petitions without imposing the proposed $100,000 fee, according to Meltzer Hellrung, a law firm that focuses on immigration law.
“USCIS is working to ensure that employment-based visa programs are used primarily to supplement, not supplant American workers,” USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler told the DCNF in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) strongly disagrees with the courts’ decisions, but DHS will comply while considering next steps, a spokesperson told the DCNF.
The Trump administration’s use of higher fees for H-1B visas helps “offset the financial incentive to hire an H-1B worker instead of an American,” Beck told the DCNF, adding that the move is only a first step.
“If it can’t be fixed, then Congress is going to have to eliminate it,” Beck said.
But there’s a key caveat, the program was “designed to be broken,” Miano told the DCNF. “The problem with H-1B is that it works exactly like Congress intended it to work.”
Beck pointed to bills in Congress that would ramp up visa restrictions, such as H.R. 8443, the End H-1B Visa Abuse Act, sponsored by Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane.
“Republicans that do identify as America First are good on this issue,” Kevin Lynn, the executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy and who runs U.S. Tech Workers to advocate for displaced tech workers, told the DCNF.
The legislation would reduce the annual H-1B visa cap from 65,000 to 25,000 and replace the visa’s lottery system with a wage-based system, per a press release from Crane’s office. Fourteen Republicans have cosponsored the bill, according to Congress.gov.
“The H-1B system has morphed into a betrayal of hardworking citizens. Instead of hiring talented young Americans graduating with STEM degrees, massive corporations are exploiting this fraud-ridden program to import cheap labor and pad their profit margins. As Members of Congress, we should be doing everything in our power to protect the next generation of our workforce,” Crane told the DCNF in a written statement, adding that the legislation amounts to the “strongest H-1B reform possible.”
“It’s time to end this abuse for good,” Crane concluded.
Another bill, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s Visa Cap Enforcement Act, would stop certain H-1B non-immigrant visa limitations, which would limit the ability of universities, research institutions and non-profits to hire an unlimited number of foreign workers.
It’s unclear if either bill has a chance of passing, with both pieces of legislation seemingly stalling out in the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
“American jobs shouldn’t go to foreign workers. My Visa Cap Enforcement Act will close loopholes in the H-1B visa program to give American STEM students a fair chance in the job market,” Cotton told the DCNF in a statement.
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
