Probably the strangest, saddest specter on the employment front in the U.S. is the inability of U.S. engineering graduates and older engineers to secure jobs in today's market.
All that talk about STEM majors, and taking a demanding degree instead of a gut major in college rings hollow given that even liberal arts and fine arts college graduates have a better chance of getting a meaningful job than today's computer engineering majors.
Seriously.
According to Raghavan Mayur's TIPP Insights:
This fact was documented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York earlier in the spring.
A link to the study and an anecdotal news report about this phenomenon is at this link here.
But Mayur writes that now there's hope, in a new website called Jobs.now.
The Jobs.now website is dedicated to getting word out to engineering and other STEM graduates about the jobs out there, which employers hide in order to hire H1-B visa holders from abroad, for cheaper wages. An army of volunteers scans local papers for local tech jobs placed there by big name employers to ensure that only a small pool of American applicants can see them. After that, the tech firm hires the H1-B visa holder and declares to the government that he ttried and can't find an American worker willing to do his $100,000 a year job.
There's no excuse now, with Jobs.now out there. Mayur puts in much more detail about this disturbing phenomenon which favors foreign over domestic workers and leaves a lot of engineering majors wondering why they can't find a job with their talent and skills.
It's not just the exploitation of this loophole that is contributing to this problem of unemployed U.S. engineers here in the U.S. Mayur also cites a Bloomberg report about middlemen in India who exploit the H1-B visa lottery by submitting multiple applications on behalf of their clients, which leaves the overwhelming majority of H1-B visa holders of Indian origin. Does the U.S. really have only a foreign talent need for Indian engineers? No Russian engineers qualify? It's obviously rigged.
The net result, again, is fewer U.S. engineers have any employment opportunities here in the U.S. Any questions as to why this has contributed to the rise of President Trump? His Justice Department is working to fix this situation.
And as Mayur notes, the private sector is working to fix the other one, through Jobs.now.
This is the righting of a very obvious wrong, and can't come soon enough for America's beleaguered workers. No more 'learn to code' for non-existent jobs that are already rigged for foreigners.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License