Part 3 in our H‑1B visa series
High Country Advocate Staff Report
When Laura Ingraham told President Donald Trump, “We have plenty of talented people here,” he didn’t hesitate. “No, you don’t,” he shot back, repeating the line when she pressed him. The exchange set off a brief political storm on the right, with commentators reminding viewers that American “talent split the atom and went to the moon” and activists warning that insulting the base’s kids was a good way to lose the mid‑terms. Underneath the outrage, though, sat a harder question that matters far more to recent graduates than to television hosts: if the United States really has “no talent,” why are so many computer science and engineering majors unemployed while companies insist they can’t find anyone to hire?
Across the country, new STEM graduates are discovering that the “sure thing” degrees they were promised no longer guarantee a job. Data drawn from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show recent computer science graduates facing unemployment around 6.1 percent, with computer engineering at roughly 7.5 percent—well above the overall unemployment rate for recent graduates and roughly double the jobless rate for the broader workforce. In other words, some of the most technical majors on campus now have worse employment outcomes than art history, even as employers lobby Washington for more temporary foreign workers on H‑1B visas to fill “critical” computer‑related roles.
In a true labor shortage, economics is boringly predictable: if companies cannot fill key roles at $90,000, they raise the offer to $120,000, then to $150,000, and keep going until the pay is high enough to pull in the people they need. Instead, many firms behave as if the market rules have been suspended for them. They start closer to $60,000, nudge compensation upward when recruiting stalls, and then stop well short of local market rates, declaring a “skills gap” rather than admitting they simply do not want to pay more. At that point, the solution they reach for is not higher wages or training programs but guest workers: entry‑level H‑1B hires brought in at what the government calls “Level I” wages—often in the mid‑$60,000s in fields where the going rate for an experienced local can be 30 percent higher. The vacancy on paper is solved, but the unemployed American graduate is still sitting at home.
The picture looks even stranger once subsidies enter the frame. In Arizona, Intel and other chipmakers have lined up billions of dollars in federal CHIPS Act support and state‑level incentives to expand advanced manufacturing. As part of that push, Intel and Maricopa Community Colleges helped build the Semiconductor Technician Quick Start program—an intensive 10‑day course that prepares local residents for entry‑level fab jobs, followed in some cases by a one‑year registered apprenticeship for facility technicians. State materials describe it as a nationally recognized boot camp, and more than 900 students have already been trained for semiconductor roles through the Quick Start pipeline and related efforts, proof that much of this work can be learned on the job over months, not decades. Yet even as that model proves effective, companies continue to request H‑1B visas for positions that look more like trainable technician and process‑engineering jobs than rarefied, one‑of‑a‑kind expert roles.
Georgia’s Hyundai‑LG “metaplant” offers another glimpse of how public promises can diverge from on‑the‑ground reality. State leaders sold the Ellabell battery complex as an 8,500‑job engine of rural revival, backed by billions in investment and generous federal and state incentives. Then, on September 4, 2025, federal agents led one of the largest single‑site immigration raids in U.S. history at the construction site, detaining roughly 475 workers, many of them South Korean nationals on visas that did not authorize the work they were doing. The plant will still likely open after a delay, and Hyundai has even announced additional expansion plans, but the episode laid bare how a marquee subsidized project intended to “create American jobs” had come to depend heavily on a vulnerable foreign workforce instead of structured training pipelines for local residents.
None of this is an argument against immigrants. H‑1B workers at chip fabs and auto plants often find themselves in the same bind as the American graduates they are compared to: tied to a single employer for their legal status, with limited bargaining power and every incentive to accept the going rate, however low. The real issue is who holds the leverage and how public money is used. When taxpayers send $52 billion to rebuild a domestic semiconductor industry, or billions more to lure an electric‑vehicle plant to a rural county, they have every right to demand more than vague “workforce development” plans and press releases about innovation. They can insist on hard numbers—for example, a requirement that every billion dollars in subsidies comes with a commitment to train a specific number of American engineers and technicians over a 12‑ to 18‑month period, reported publicly each year along with how many H‑1B visas the company is seeking and what it pays those workers compared with locals.
Closing the loop would also mean tackling one of the quiet reasons companies avoid training: the fear that a rival will swoop in and hire away a newly up‑skilled worker at no cost. A training‑cost liability system, of the sort labor economists have floated in other contexts, would flip that calculation. Under such a framework, if Company A spends serious money bringing a new engineering graduate up to speed on specialized tools over a year or more, and Company B hires that worker away inside a three‑year window, both the employee and Company B would owe Company A a defined share of the training costs. Poaching is no longer free, and the excuse that “we can’t train because they’ll just leave” loses its force. With those protections in place, the cheapest option for many firms would be the one that benefits their communities: hire domestic graduates at market wages, invest in their skills, and reserve H‑1B petitions for positions that genuinely cannot be filled any other way.
Read against that backdrop, Trump’s “No, you don’t” sounds less like a description of American talent and more like a diagnosis of American policy. The country has plenty of capable engineers and computer scientists, including in Colorado’s front range and mountain communities; what it lacks is a system that rewards companies for paying and training them. Until that changes, new STEM graduates will keep struggling to break in, foreign workers will keep being used as a discount line item rather than true specialists, and taxpayers will keep footing the bill for a “skills shortage” that looks, in practice, a lot like old‑fashioned wage suppression dressed up in modern language.
Support Independent Local Journalism — High Country Advocate was created as a real alternative to regional media that too often silences dissenting voices while taking sides in the political struggle. Producing in-depth, unflinching reporting like this series and others is expensive: servers, editing, research time, and legal review all add up quickly. If these articles have informed you or given you new perspective, please consider supporting HCA with a paid subscription — every subscriber helps keep this reporting strong and independent. 