Currently featured on Bloomberg’s website is a March 10 article that analyzes how the “Optional Practical Training” program has greatly increased the numbers of supposedly skilled foreign workers in the U.S. and in the process shut out thousands of American graduates looking for work.
The article, “The STEM Graduate System Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It,” by Rachel Rosenthal, details the story of how Microsoft conspired with Obama’s Department of Homeland Security to greatly expand OPT to the point where it has become, in Rosenthal’s words, “the U.S.’s largest pipeline for skilled [sic] guest workers.” And all without the slightest input from Congress.
The Optional Practical Training program–which basically treats entry-level work as “education”–gradually grew out of a number of changes to U.S. education and guest worker polices, beginning in the 1950s. The program as we know it was created in 1992. At that time it allowed foreign graduates of U.S. universities to work for one year beyond graduation. Up until 2007-2008, foreign graduates wishing to work here for longer than that needed H-1B visas, which were capped by a Congress that by then had grown reluctant to bow to lobbyist demands for cap increases.
As John Miano, co-author with Michelle Malkin of Sold Out, describes, this inspired the cheap-labor lobby to try something different:
In 2007, Microsoft concocted a scheme to use OPT as a means to circumvent the H-1B quotas. Microsoft’s plan was to extend the duration of OPT from a year to 29-months, so that the duration would be sufficient to serve as a guest worker program, rather than just an internship-type program. Microsoft proposed this scheme to the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a dinner party at the home of the owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team. From there, DHS worked in absolute secrecy with industry lobbyists to craft regulations implementing Microsoft’s plan.
Rosenthal, in her Bloomberg piece, reveals how by April 2008, DHS had nearly tripled the maximum duration of OPT. From that point on, work permits went sky high. By 2019, 411,000 people had documentation to work under OPT, along with another 126,000 in the pre-graduation version of the program known as Curricular Practical Training (CPT).
Together, the two programs since 2015 have each year exceeded the totals of the H-1B program, and thus have neatly done an end-around past Congress’s cap.
What’s more, in Rosenthal’s words:
OPT has also opened a side door into the U.S. job market with minimal labor protections and oversight. It is increasingly funneling cheaper and more pliable, visa-dependent foreign candidates into fields such as software engineering and development, depressing wages and making a once-attractive career path less desirable. Moreover, even as OPT benefits U.S. schools eager to attract foreign students, it can undercut American students looking for work. And there have been too many instances of exploitation and outright fraud.
Much of Rosenthal’s article has to do with those instances of exploitation and fraud that have plagued the OPT/CPT programs.
One particular area of fraud involves the putative “highly skilled” status of the foreign students and graduates, more than half of whom come from India, followed by China and South Korea. According to Rosenthal, the vast majority–more than 70 percent–of OPT guest workers with M.A. degrees obtained them at substandard universities, many of them outright diploma or visa mills. These “schools” offer few, if any, classes and quickly place students into low-level jobs. An ICE investigation last year found that thousands of students were attending dozens of such fake schools.
OPT has made it possible for foreign, non-immigrant guest workers to live and work in the U.S. almost indefinitely, simply by maintaining a relationship with a school that may or may not be legitimate at all. Meanwhile, the price tag for advanced degrees at real American universities has priced American citizens out of the graduate school market, at the same time OPT recipients have pushed them out of the job market.
It’s a perfect storm for American graduates and as usual at the center of it is the corporate-government-education combine.
For more see, the Bloomberg website. For a history of OPT, see CIS.org.