An Immigration Scheme That’s Undermining America

For too long, many Republicans have confined their criticisms of mass migration to illegal immigration. But the truth is that our entire legal immigration system is broken—and the consequences for Americans have been nothing short of disastrous.

The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program is a clear example of the urgent need for reform.

Recent reports have outlined the Trump Administration’s plans to overhaul or end OPT. As I noted in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow earlier this month, this is welcome news. It would represent a long-overdue correction to one of the most abused programs in the U.S. immigration system.

The OPT program is a work benefit tied to the F-1 visa, the standard nonimmigrant student visa that allows foreign nationals to attend U.S. colleges and universities. The program allows student visa holders to work in the U.S. for up to 12 months after finishing their degree; STEM graduates are allowed an additional 24-month extension.

Today, however, the program functions as a cheap-labor pipeline for big business—and a backdoor into the U.S. job market for foreign workers. OPT serves the financial interests of large corporations and academic institutions at the expense of young American workers and students.

This system boxes young Americans out of the workforce, discriminates against American workers in favor of foreign labor, and suppresses wages and job opportunities for U.S. graduates. At the same time, it distorts our higher education system, encourages visa mill fraud, and poses a serious threat to our national security and prosperity.

Americans never asked for, or even authorized, this program. OPT was created (and then expanded) by unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch, without the input or approval of Congress, circumventing the caps and limits that govern employment-based visas.

Many of OPT’s proponents defend the program as a triumph of free enterprise and meritocracy, empowering businesses to hire the best and brightest workers in the world. In reality, the program is a significant government distortion of the market.

From the start, OPT has stacked the deck against young Americans and makes foreign labor more attractive. For one, foreign nationals working under OPT are exempt from federal payroll taxes. As Senator Chuck Grassley noted in 2018, U.S. employers who hire them “reap a windfall,” amounting to “a cost savings of around 8 percent per student-employee.” In other words, American businesses are effectively receiving a tax break every time they hire a foreign worker over an American. A September 2024 study from the Center for Immigration Studies found that the OPT program now amounts to a “$4 billion tax exemption.”

OPT also provides another incentive for employers. Foreign workers who want to stay in the U.S. after their OPT ends usually need to secure an employment-based visa such as the H-1B, which requires them to be sponsored by a U.S. employer. As a result, they’re often hesitant to complain about subpar wages or working conditions. Employers can leverage this compliance to keep wages low, knowing these workers are often desperate to stay in America—a phenomenon investigators have dubbed “techsploitation.”

OPT essentially allows companies to bypass the modest, loophole-ridden, and woefully insufficient protections of visa programs like H-1B and draw from a virtually unlimited pipeline of low-cost foreign labor.

Additionally, OPT workers are not subject to numerical caps, labor-market tests, or any prevailing-wage standards. Employers face no obligation to recruit or even consider American applicants first. The result is a massive, unregulated labor pool of recent foreign graduates who are cheaper to hire than their American counterparts and can be cycled through indefinitely.

At the aggregate level, the presence of a large pool of tax-friendly foreign labor puts downward pressure on entry-level salaries across entire industries. It’s a win-win for big business and foreign interests—and a lose-lose for young American workers and graduates.

It should be no surprise that OPT participation has exploded over the past two decades. The number of foreign students enrolled in the program has more than doubled since 2007. Under the Biden Administration, the situation only worsened. In 2023-2024, the number of OPT participants reached an all-time high. Today, by some estimates, the number of foreign students working in America via these paid programs is in excess of half a million.

Most foreign students who enroll in these programs pursue degrees in STEM fields and are hired by employers in the tech and STEM industries. These employers argue that this system is necessary to fill worker shortages, claiming they simply can’t find Americans to work these jobs.

The data, however, tells a different story. U.S. STEM and tech students have some of the highest post-graduation unemployment rates of any major in the job market. In early 2025, physics majors had the second-highest unemployment rate of any discipline among recent U.S. college graduates—more than double the rate for majors such as philosophy, art history, and ethnic studies. Computer engineering had the third-highest unemployment rate, closely followed by computer science and information systems.

The job market is not the only sphere of American life that has been adversely affected by this system. OPT and its companion programs have effectively transformed many U.S. universities into labor brokers, feeding foreign workers into American jobs while our own young people are kept out of the market.

These programs have flooded our higher education system with foreign students, depriving qualified American candidates of positions at top universities. In 2023-2024, the total number of foreign students in the U.S. university system hit a record high of over 1.1 million, coinciding with the record-breaking number of foreign nationals enrolled in OPT.

Universities have a major financial incentive to do this, as foreign students tend to pay far higher tuition fees than their American counterparts. The result is that young Americans are being boxed out of both the workforce and the university system in their own country.

Foreign students now make up 20–30% of total enrollment for many elite or public universities, and sometimes a far higher percentage in graduate programs. Last year, for example, a full 39% of Columbia University’s total student body was foreign. For New York University, that number approached 44%—a 244% increase since 2013.

As it currently stands, there is no federal ceiling on how many foreign nationals a college or university can enroll. Even unaccredited institutes and for-profit colleges can enroll foreign students and sponsor them for CPT and later OPT. The consequence is the phenomenon of visa mills: nominal universities that are essentially fronts for immigration fraud.

There is no tenable reason why American students and graduates should be forced to compete against an uncapped flood of foreign labor in our own schools and businesses. If executive action created this system, it can overhaul—or end—it too.

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