> ... when there are plenty of US citizens in STEM who are underemployed.

Where, exactly?

Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2].

[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-unemployment...).

[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-median-wage-....

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433814-000-most-ste...

I'm not seeing it either. The only engineers I met who are 'under employed' either left the field intentionally, decided to go backpack Europe for 3 years after they graduated (some fields it definitely seems like if your not in the field for awhile the value of your degree vanishes), or they graduated and moved to a place where I live with a ChemE degree looking for ChemE jobs when we have maybe 2 companies in town that hire a small number of ChemEs. It is a highly desired location, so why pay an inexperience ungrad when you can score a ChemE moving into the area with a decades experience at a good price.

Another good one. We hired a person with a MechE degree with experience working at JPL into our customer support because they are so in love with the area because of easy access to winter activities (snow shoing, skiing, etc).

Unemployment != underemployment.

So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc.

The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative.

> Where, exactly?

The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemistry, etc. However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.

It seems that data is not relevant, then?

I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.

> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.

Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?

I didn’t make up the word underemployment, economists did.

Here is some data that tries to at least look at this question: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...

The gross number is only 1/3 of stem degree lead to stem jobs. But that includes quite a bit of soft degree's, still in the ballpark of half of all graduates not working in their field.

> software jobs

Yes there is higher demand for software which is met with higher wages and drawing underemployed people with other degrees as well as immigration. The immigration restriction argument is that increasing that part of the equation will lower wages and increase corporate control of their workforce.

So an alternative way to meet that demand is to hire us citizens who have those qualifications or a related degree that could be trained.

Try telling that to all the laid off tech workers or the new grads failing to find jobs.

I sincerely urge you to check out macro-economic books and lectures.

Imo your narrative amounts is simply not grounded in reality.