America’s STEM Graduates Play Rigged Game While Foreigners Get Deal Of A Lifetime
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.
Sean Moran · Oct 29, 2026 · 9 min read
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.