Foreign Stem Graduates Are Being Shut Out of the U.S. Job Market
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For the typical country, it's fair. The typical country does not permit an American to easily go over there and take a job.
For STEM graduates (or people with years of work experience in that field), the EU's Blue Card program basically would give you a residence permit (to use the exact term; most visas are for stays less than 3 months) if the prospective employer offered you a contract where the wage is on a similar level to locals.
And I wonder, why not. The companies need the brain power, they've certainly vetted the candidates, the company increases its productivity and the country gets another taxpayer.
Is the idea that students on OPT or employees on H-1Bs are all high-performing geniuses a myth that is believed widely? The implication (or maybe I am reading too much into one sentence) is something that I have seen quite often. Every student from an accredited university is eligible for a one-year OPT. Every student with a STEM degree is eligible for the STEM extension. The field one works in does not have to do anything with the degree since the case is often made that the skills learned during the degree program are highly transferable. In my experience, it was very rare to not get an OPT or an extension approved. This made a masters degree the cheapest and the fastest path to immigrate into the U.S. Whether this is fair or not is a collective judgement call by U.S. citizenry but it would reasonably be given very low or no priority when millions of citizens are suffering economically.
I wish people didn't do this, not any more. Getting a full-time job (even on F1 STEM extension) had been increasingly difficult to get pre-coronavirus, even if you were pretty smart. I've had many employers reject even looking at my application because of potential visa issues, and big cos who can handle the visa process have a very hit-or-miss interview process. And this is just for software jobs; the going gets a lot tougher for people in non-software STEM fields.
Unless you can easily afford 2 years of tuition + living expenses and/or get full-ride scholarships, it is time to seriously reconsider going to the US to study. Almost all random events like the virus (and even known, regular events like political elections) are always going to make things even more difficult than they already are.