There is no shortage of fresh grad engineers in Canada, and our unemployment rate is lower than that in the US. In Canada, less than 1/3 of people with engineering degrees actually work as engineers or engineering managers, whereas when surveyed in their 3rd and 4th year, at least 80-90% of engineering students intend to pursue a career in engineering. Yet as high as your unemployment rate is right now, the situation for your fresh grads is way better than it is here in Canada for one reason only: your H1B visa program for foreign-trained engineers. Here there is no such program- there are NO controls over how many engineers arrive here as immigrants versus how many the labour market needs. Even if only half of those immigrants take jobs which might otherwise be taken by fresh grads, the result would still be devastating.
This is the same old game played again and again by politicians and the business lobby worldwide, and abetted by the publicly-funded educational institutions. There's a logical error in the reasoning behind doing this. They argue (correctly) that engineers are important to the economy, but they incorrectly assume that if they increase the number of engineering grads, the economy will do better. In fact, what we have already and have had for many, many years, is a critical shortage of entry-level positions for fresh engineering graduates, such that most leave the profession immediately upon graduation.
Rather than seeing their role as public servants, the university system see themselves as a "business" which needs to grow at all costs, regardless what is happening to the population. This is a growing, parasitic drain on our society, yet "education" is the 2nd worship word here behind "health care"- nobody can cut its funding in any way without howls of public protest.
In the 1980s, firms got addicted to not needing to hire young people and train them. When the labour market tightened a bit in the '90s and engineering salaries started to rise, the major engineering firms cried "shortage!" and lobbied the Federal government to remove the profession-specific quotas on "skilled immigrants". As a result we got a flood of engineering immigrants so huge that a number equal to Canada's entire engineering graduating class tried to settle in Toronto alone every year from 2001 through 2003. Immigrant engineers got smart, talked to one another, and stopped coming in such huge numbers- nothing changed on the quota side or the points system and yet their immigration rate dropped from 16,800/yr in 2003 to ~4-5,000/yr where it is now. So the major engineering employers are now abusing the temporary foreign workers program- the one intended for migrant fruit pickers and other seaonal labour- all in an effort to avoid having to hire young and train them.
All of this is what happens when a profession becomes a commodity. I don't see it changing any time soon.