Additionally, just as all Bachelor's degrees are not alike, neither are all STEM bachelor's degrees. For instance wildlife ecology, forest management, archaeology, anthropology, etc., are all degrees that are include in the STEM Bachelor's degrees. However they have very little demand in the marketplace outside of perhaps academia, teaching or government.
The study itself has an appendix that states that it included degrees under the categories of such items as "animal science", "food science", "botany", "zoology", "ecology", "nutrition science", "miscellaneous biology", "cognitive science", "astronomy", which encompass the above degrees such as forest management and wildlife ecology which are both "ecology" degrees.
Okay, so what you're saying is that on the right side of the image above there are some degrees under the "Science" heading which have little opportunity for employment. Okay, fair enough. Although i would argue most Americans are spending their time and energy getting STEM degrees that are employable yet, because of foreigners with those same degrees getting these jobs in the U.S., many Americans are getting screwed and having to find employment outside of the areas in which they trained and/or worked (in the case of workers being made to train their cheaper foreign replacements).
From the study:
"As already indicated, the acronym STEM stands for science (life and physical), technology (computer science), engineering, and math."
[highlight]
"Table 2 (below) reads as follows: 50 percent of natives with a technology degree have a technology job. The grayed boxes show the share of those working in the same field as their undergraduate degrees. Thus, only 2 percent of natives with a math degree have a math job, only 34 percent of the U.S.-born with an engineering degree work as an engineer, and 10 percent of those with a science degree have a job in science." [/highlight]
So even if, for the sake of argument, you want to ignore the right side of the above image under the "Science" heading and only consider degrees on the left side of the above image (ie. Technology, Mathematics, and Engineering), you still have a huge number of Americans who have spent a chunk of their lives getting STEM degrees in employable STEM fields (and some who have worked in those fields for decades) who either cannot get jobs in those fields, or are being thrown out of fields in which they have trained and worked for decades because huge numbers of foreigners with those same degrees are being brought into this country to work at the same jobs.
So, at a bachelor's level (which most tech jobs in this country require) in computer science and engineering, it is
completely unnecessary to increase the supply of foreign H1b visa workers. And this is where most of these H1b's are going. If you're talking about highly specialized skills then there _might_ be a need to import a foreigner here or there. But that's the exception not the rule.
Now there are some here who feel it is okay to import huge numbers of foreigners willing to take the jobs of American tech workers on the cheap. That's a
different argument and an argument of globalization versus nationalism. I _despise_ globalization because it's a race to the bottom to compete against foreigners willing to be slave laborers just to get a paycheck. And globalization has proven since the 1990s to massively decrease the standard of living of American citizens as a whole. Artificially increasing the supply of foreign tech workers distorts the U.S. labor market and the whole supply/demand equation; without this distortion, employers would have to pay the going rate. Rather than a race to the bottom which globalization pushes, I prefer stabilization of our labor market so that living standards can be lifted up for the working and middle classes.
