why is ycombinator promoting immigration thru H1B when so many US born CS grads are finding it hard to get job. In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That…
That's not an apples to apples comparison. You don't know if the foreign workers were senior-level employees, for example, or whether there were specialized requirements they might have been hired against that entry-level grads won't qualify for. I agree there should be more entry-level roles. But this is not an indictment of the system. You should ask what percentage of those foreign workers were hired into entry-le…
Another factor that complicates the analysis is that foreign students do not necessarily represent the same cross-section as US students. The high cost of US education tends to bifurcate the sample size into a bimodal distribution: you have rich foreign students who can afford tuition rates, or you have scholarship students who earned their scholarship quite fairly thanks to merit. Neither population can be fairly compared against the average US citizen in terms of hiring likelihood - either you're pitting the top 1% of someone in the home country to the median US student, or you're comparing someone who's got the resources to find opportunities in ways US students can't.
Finally, it's been my experience, seeing others though the F1 -> H1B pipeline, that most people pursue that pipeline through a master's degree rather than a bachelor's degree. This is because both immigration law and tuition rates incentivise shorter programs for advanced education. If you're comparing the hiring rates of master's students to bachelor's students, naturally you're going to get a revealed preference for master's students.
tl;dr the simple statistic cited needs critical questioning.