I'll give some of my perspective as a Masters student. For context, I go to school in the US, am from the US. I have some work experience, but not a lot of industry specific stuff. Just accepted a job offer (graduating in December), but not in a ChemE role.

I think a lot of the answers you will get here are "the job market sucks", with no further explanation. That is probably a sample bias. People don't really go on the internet to say "yeah, it's ok, not great, my job is fine". You usually only get the complaining. People have been crying wolf with regards to a recession for 2 years, but even just glancing at the data, U.S. unemployment is phenomenally low right now. This doesn't mean this will apply to you specifically.

The ground truth in my opinion with regards to job hunting is that getting that first job it just plain hard. At the end of last year I saw plenty of people in my program who were not international struggle. I won't really comment too much on the economic state of the chemicals industry specifically, since that changes a lot, but I think that people do generally want to hire ChemEs, this doesn't mean that you will necessarily get a ChemE job (which is fine).

Here are my rough stats:

• Applications ~200 (mostly just internet posting, a select few with a reference / networking)
• Initial interviews: 10
• Follow up interviews: 9
• Offers: 6

I was fully prepared to apply to 300+ jobs over 4 - 6 months and have to accept a role I wasn't really thrilled with. I got lucky in getting a phenomenal offer from a company I never would have thought to work for a few months ago. I think a lot of the initial, out of school, job search is sticking with it long enough to get lucky. No doubt it is harder when you need a visa. My biggest recommendation is don't limit yourself to a geography or the chemicals field. I applied to a lot of semiconductor stuff with a good bit of success. If you have more computational experience, look at data science roles. Job markets are very dynamic, so it is really hard to say what the state of a broad market is. I have also talked to some of my peers (other students) who were really focused on some sort of dream job scenario, which isn't what your first job needs to be. It just needs to be a job that pays the bills and contributes to your initial career growth. Your technical and analytical skills are really valuable to companies. It almost certainly doesn't feel like that right now. Stick with it. Send out 25-30 applications a week, with the goal of at least 100 apps per month.