Here's a pairing that should get more attention than it does: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that recent computer science graduates faced a 6.1% unemployment rate as of February 2025, with underemployment at 16.5%. Engineering graduates weren't far behind, at 7.5% unemployment and 17% underemployment. These are young people who did exactly what they were told would guarantee a career — studied a technical field, earned a degree — arriving into a labor market that, per Layoffs.fyi, shed roughly 80,000 tech jobs in 2025 alone. Meanwhile, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens and green card holders with computer science degrees in 2023, all of them competing for a shrinking pool of entry-level openings.
Roughly 400,000 H-1B visas were approved in 2024 — more than double the number approved in 2000 — even as the broader job market weakened and USCIS hit its 2026 allocation cap by July 2025, months ahead of schedule. Ron Hira, a researcher at Howard University who studies the visa system, describes the pressure on new graduates as coming from multiple directions with "reinforcing effects": H-1B hiring, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program that lets foreign graduates work in the U.S. without a visa at all, and offshored roles are all "competing for a shrinking labor demand" at the same time entry-level American hiring is contracting.
There's also a credentialing shift worth flagging. In 2000, 57% of H-1B holders came in with bachelor's degrees and 30% with master's; that ratio has essentially reversed since. On its face that sounds like the program upgrading toward more advanced expertise. But Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA offers a more skeptical read: "Most H-1B workers are classified and paid as 'entry level,'" he notes — meaning even workers with advanced degrees are frequently slotted into wage bands designed for junior roles, undercutting the pay floor for the same entry-level positions new American graduates are trying to break into.
The wage gap data reinforces the concern rather than resolving it. Cato Institute figures put the median U.S. worker's 2021 wage at $45,760, against a median H-1B wage of $108,000 that same year — evidence that on paper, at least in aggregate, H-1B roles skew toward higher-paid technical positions rather than displacing minimum-wage work. But that aggregate comparison obscures the entry-level compression Beck is describing: a $108,000 median can still coexist with H-1B workers being systematically classified at the bottom of a technical pay band, which is exactly where new American computer science and engineering graduates are trying to land their first job.
Ben Nucci, an immigration attorney quoted in the reporting, offers the industry's standard defense: employers typically pursue H-1B sponsorship only after a "significant period of advertising and trying to search for someone" domestically. That's the process on paper. It coexists uneasily with 6.1% unemployment among computer science graduates and a July 2025 jobs report that added just 73,000 positions nationally, with the prior two months revised down by a combined 258,000. Pew Research found 61% of Americans believe legal immigrants fill jobs citizens are unwilling to do — but computer science and engineering are not those jobs. They're the jobs an entire generation was told to pursue as a safe bet, arriving now into a market where the visa pipeline and the layoff wave hit at the exact same time.
Read the original reporting: H-1B Visas Under Scrutiny as Tech Layoffs Hit College Grads.