USCIS Nominee: Feds Should Reform OPT Migration Program

The government should reduce the huge migration program that annually transports at least 400,000 foreign graduates into Americans’ white-collar jobs, the incoming head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency (USCIS) told senators Wednesday.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) set the stage for the dramatic policy shift by asking USCIS nominee Joe Edlow for policy fixes to the migration program:

The [Joe] Biden administration … One of the many things they turned on their heads involves the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. They turned it into the single largest guest worker program, bypassing the traditional limitations, the internal rules that would otherwise apply by operation of law on other visas like H-1B in the United States. What changes would you plan — if confirmed — … to fix that issue?

“Thank you, Senator,” Edlow replied, before answering:

I think the way in which OPT has been handled over the past four years — with the help of certain decisions coming out of the D.C. Circuit Court — have been a real problem in terms of misapplication of the law. What I want to see would be essentially a regulatory and sub-regulatory program that would allow us to remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 [foreign] students beyond the time that they are in school.

“Thank you,” Lee replied.

The May 21 statement is promising, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “I guess it all depends on how they write the regulation. I get a little nervous because that [language] leaves a loophole for [migrants to] stay enrolled in so that they can work right.”

But any effort to roll back the program will be met with an avalanche of lawsuits, lobbyists, and media outrage. Much of the pushback will come from universities that earn perhaps $30 billion in tuition fees from foreign students seeking the OPT work permits. The FWD.us lobby group will help quarterback any changes that would harm the interests of its consumer-economy investors.

“Any rollback of OPT will severely harm international students and our ability to attract talented students from around the world, our nation’s global competitiveness, economic growth, national research capacity and future innovation,” claimed Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

Trimming OPT ‘is the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” tweeted a former New York investor, Isaac Hasson. “No smart international students will study in America if there’s almost no prospect of staying. The OPT … is the on-ramp for some of the most talented immigrants,” he added.

The OPT work permit program was created by deputies working for President George W. Bush, not by Congress. A companion program, the Curricular Practical Training program, allows students to get one-year work permits. In 2023, the two programs granted work permits to help 541,000 foreigners take white-collar jobs for up to three years.

That has a huge impact on the roughly 800,000 Americans who graduate each year with skilled four-year degrees in medicine, business, engineering, science, computers, and math.

Some of the OPT foreigners use the work permits to travel and live in the U.S. But many use the permits to win career-starting jobs in prestigious high-tech, high-salary companies. This government intervention helps to steer jobs away from interior states, suppress salaries in coastal states, and boost share prices.

The program displaces many U.S. college graduates, partly because it offers a tax break for hiring foreign graduates, but also because it allows U.S. companies an easy and unsupervised way to hire their favor-trading co-ethnics into career-starting jobs.

The OPT program is also a feeder for the controversial H-1B program, which annually delivers roughly 120,000 foreign white-collar workers into the Fortune 500 jobs needed by U.S. graduates. The various visa programs keep roughly 1.5 million foreign workers into Americans’ white-collar jobs.

The white-collar inflow has deeply damaged career prospects for many American graduates who are locked out of career-starting jobs by foreign graduates. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported:

The labor market for recent college graduates deteriorated noticeably in the first quarter of 2025. The unemployment rate jumped to 5.8 percent—the highest reading since 2021—and the underemployment rate rose sharply to 41.2 percent.

The unemployment rate for high-tech graduates was higher than average, according to the report. For example, the unemployment rate for “computer engineering” graduates was 7.5 percent, and for “computer science” graduates was 6.1 percent.

“Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers,” the Atlantic magazine reported in April. “Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work,”

“Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis,” the Atlantic added.

The inflow has also frozen salary growth for many college graduates since 2008. The resulting wealth transfer to stockholders makes it difficult for young graduates to get married, buy homes, and begin families.

‘The damage to Americans far outweighs any minor benefit to employers, which is strictly financial,” Vaughan said, adding:

There are Americans who could do these jobs. It’s not like we’re denying [companies] talent. It’s just the elimination OPT would be denying them cheaper talent. [It] operates without any oversight whatsoever, whether on salaries or fair competition for the jobs, or discrimination … It was created out of thin air and without a statutory basis …

The inflow creates massive risks to innovation, privacy, stock values, and national security.

The program details are buried in the website operated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which does show that 530,000 foreign graduates have work permissions via the OPT program and a version for undergraduates, dubbed the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program. The total includes 75,000 graduates from India and China working in tech jobs that would otherwise go to accomplished American professionals.

Computer professional Jim from Herndon recently told Breitbart News that he has a nephew who graduated last year with a degree in engineering and computers, and a nephew who is about to graduate with a degree in Geographic Information Systems: “They found nothing, so they think they’ll be doing lifeguarding in the summer.”

Graduates “only have two years after they graduate to get a pipeline [career-starting job, and then [recruiters] move on to the next new grads,” he said. In contrast, his two nieces with degrees in sociology and film studies landed administration and marketing jobs for roughly $100,000, he added.

ICE/SEVIS

In 2021, Biden’s deputies stopped providing data about which companies hired the OPT and CPT workers. In 2019, however, officials showed that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Intel hired roughly 5,500 foreign graduates instead of hiring American graduates. Much of the OPT hiring is conducted via ethnic networks that are closed to Americans, according to Breitbart News.

“I think it’s good for [OPT supporters] to start shrieking,” said Vaughan. “Because now Americans will understand what they will actually have a chance to find out about this program and how it works.”

https://twitter.com/RonHira/status/1922777673119502560/photo/4