The Fight Begins Over Student Workers
While ICE raids dominate headlines, the administration is quietly building a case to gut OPT — the visa program powering Silicon Valley's talent pipeline.
by Arjun Singh
On July 30, Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal exclusively reported that the Trump Administration was considering a step that could, effectively, terminate merit-based legal immigration. The plan is to charge a $100,000 fee for international students to use the controversial Optional Practical Training (OPT) program to work in the country.
OPT has been in the crosshairs of conservatives for years. They claim the program takes jobs away from American workers and allows unfettered legal immigration. Support for the program, by contrast, brings together progressives, businesses, and industry, who argue that it’s a lifeline for top talent to stay in America and support cutting-edge innovation.
As MAGA fights against all forms of immigration, mass deportation raids by ICE and the deaths of migrants in custody are getting the most attention. But the challenge to OPT is an underrated threat to documented law-abiding immigrants. If successful, the assault could have massive consequences for the economy, higher education, and immigration overall.
What’s OPT?
The OPT program is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and allows international students on the standard F-1 student visa to work in the United States after graduation temporarily. “OPT” stands for “Optional Practical Training” and is intended to help students gain skills in their field of study.
OPT is available after any degree on F-1 status, though graduate students overwhelmingly use it. The degree must be from a U.S. college or university authorized to enroll F-1 international students, i.e., in the Student Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). Recall that it’s the same program from which Harvard was controversially removed – barring its ability to enroll international students – last year.
After graduation, a student’s OPT time normally lasts 12 months, after which they must either obtain another status, such as H-1B, or leave the United States. Graduates with a degree in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can get a 24-month extension, which allows them to work in the U.S. for a total of 36 months or three years after graduation.
OPT comes with restrictions, and students cannot just freely work for any employer. The job must be in their “field of study,” which is determined by their degree. A nursing major, for instance, can only work as a nurse and not at a restaurant. Also, only companies enrolled in the E-Verify program to check workers’ employment authorization can employ under OPT. If a student reenrolls in school or changes to another status, they will lose their OPT time.
Since it grants legal authorization to work in America, OPT is very popular. An estimated 72 percent of all F-1 graduates use OPT status, with an even higher figure among STEM graduates who can receive the 24-month extension.
OPT is part of a long history of international student work. It was the Truman administration, in 1947, that first authorized “employment for practical training” by international students for up to 18 months. In 1992, the George H.W. Bush administration rechristened the program with the “OPT” name.
In 2008, the George W. Bush administration granted STEM graduates the 24-month extension after a public plea from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates during testimony to Congress, where he called for more foreign workers and championed the OPT program by name.
“Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage…take such action immediately,” Gates said on March 18 of that year. The administration issued an interim rule doing what Gates wanted just 20 days later, on April 8.
A Gateway to America
Perhaps the biggest advantage of OPT is that students do not need to be sponsored by their employers and petition USCIS for approval to take a job. So long as they graduate, a student can use OPT to work in the United States, on the same terms as a domestic worker, for 12 to 36 months.
This is a huge advantage. Sponsorship is a costly barrier that dissuades employers from hiring foreign workers. The system is designed that way to favor American workers. “Many employers have policies prohibiting visa sponsorship, and some just do not want the expense or hassle,” Mark Rhoads of the National Association of Colleges and Employers wrote.
“Employers are unfamiliar with the process of hiring an international student and therefore believe it to be complicated and expensive,” the University of Virginia wrote regarding misconceptions about international student employment.
Instead, OPT gives international students the chance to prove themselves as competent employees so that, when their time expires, their employer will sponsor them to continue working under another visa. To that end, many international students seek an employer’s sponsorship – e.g., as H-1B specialty workers, O-1 aliens of extraordinary ability, or for a permanent residency (i.e., a “green card”) – to keep working in the U.S. after OPT expires. This fact makes OPT the gateway for employment-based immigration to America.
Not every international student can make this transition. While every F-1 student is eligible for OPT – in Fiscal Year 2024, 505,000 students were using it – only 85,000 H-1B visas may be granted every year, while O-1 and Green Card grants to fresh graduates are rare. This means that many foreign students inevitably cycle out of the workforce.
USCIS does not publish data on how many OPT recipients eventually get green cards. However, of all employment-based green cards granted between 2015 and 2024 (the latest year for which statistics are available), at least 70 percent were granted each year via “adjustment of status,” i.e., to workers already in the country. A large proportion of these workers, who were present in the country in H-1B or O-1 status, obtained it because of OPT.
Essential Workers
The OPT program has a high economic impact. It’s a powerful incentive for students to study STEM subjects, to get 36 months of work in the United States, and a pathway to permanent immigration. This increases the output of highly skilled technical workers entering the U.S. job market.
OPT is also a powerful incentive for international students to choose U.S. universities. The United States is the world’s largest economy with unbeatable salaries in professional roles compared to other Western states. Foreign students want to cash in on their education, especially after very high tuition. Hence, OPT is often the deciding factor when choosing college or graduate school in the United States versus another top destination, such as Canada or the United Kingdom.
“Any reduction of OPT would harm higher education in this country: if international students are unable to apply their degrees to post-study work opportunities, fewer students will be drawn to study in the U.S.” The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, an association of college presidents, wrote in a report in 2020.
There’s no one study that measures the value directly added by OPT to the U.S. economy, but its effect can be inferred from other sources. As a magnet for international students, OPT’s indirect effect is enormous.
In the 2024-2025 academic year, international students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy, supporting over 350,000 jobs for U.S. workers, according to the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA). Many of these students would not have come to the U.S. but for OPT.
Furthermore, a 2019 study found that OPT actually increases the employment of U.S. workers, since businesses now have more workers to build and scale.
“A larger number of foreign students approved for OPT … is associated with a lower unemployment rate among those U.S. workers,” the National Foundation for American Policy, which led the study, concluded.
If anything, OPT is likely critical to America’s competitiveness in technology, especially artificial intelligence and advanced computing, the innovation of which is powering the U.S. economy. Over 50 percent of engineering graduate students in America are international, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government estimates, which rises in specialty fields such as electrical engineering, where it’s 74 percent.
International students also comprise 72 percent of computer science graduates, Harvard also found. It’s clear then that foreign students dominate the pipelines of talent to top technology companies, where workers are in demand. Across the industry, there are big “skills gaps” where companies face a shortage of competent workers, which need to be filled to keep systems running, let alone innovate. They would be larger but for the international students and OPT that’s filling them.
“Elimination of the OPT program would have a devastating impact on Intel’s ability to source and hire…where we experience a shortage of qualified U.S. workers,” wrote Patrick Duffy, an executive for computer chip-maker Intel, in a sworn court filing in 2018.
“Without the OPT program, the US would lose between 10,000-15,000 people with AI skills each year,” wrote Sam Peak, an immigration policy expert for the Economic Innovation Group.
OPT brings not just workers, but founders and inventors to America. Among all “unicorn” startups, i.e., privately held and worth over $1 billion, 25 percent have an immigrant co-founder who was an F-1 international student.
Moreover, a 10 percent increase in foreign graduates produces a 3.6 percent increase in patents, according to the American Economic Association. The Niskanen Center broke down those numbers even further, finding that 10 OPT workers per area produce five additional patents from that area. The evidence suggests that OPT supports innovation in America.
All of these benefits support the United States’s efforts to compete against China, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI). Retaining AI-qualified graduates is an essential national security priority, since talent is necessary for AI innovation.
“Other countries are opening their immigration systems and aggressively recruiting U.S.-trained AI talent,” concluded a study by Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology in 2019. “Given the lack of available alternative visas for these [AI] graduates, many would likely be forced to leave the United States if OPT were eliminated,” it added.
Hardliners Attack
Despite its appeal, OPT is under fire in politics. Immigration hardliners, many in the Republican Party, want to kill the program, arguing that it takes away jobs from U.S. workers.
“[T]he program [has] expanded into a de facto guestworker program operating outside the framework Congress established for employment-based immigration,” wrote the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an anti-immigration nonprofit. They call it a “work-around” for corporations and other big businesses to hire workers at lower salaries than Americans.
OPT indeed comes with no minimum salary requirement. However, the OPT extension for STEM workers requires employers to certify that an OPT worker “will not replace [a] U.S. worker” and that their compensation is commensurate with the similar U.S. employees. In fact, international student workers get paid more than native-born employees, according to the National Survey of College Graduates in 2023.
In Congress, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) is probably the biggest opponent of OPT and has repeatedly called for its abolition. “American companies get tax breaks to hire foreign students. All while demoralized Americans front the bill and train their foreign replacements—we have to end OPT,” Schmitt wrote in April.
Schmitt’s quip about tax breaks is misleading. Because OPT workers are on a temporary status, they’re considered “nonresident aliens” for tax purposes, and companies do not need to pay or collect payroll taxes from them. It’s not a tax break per se, and workers still pay federal income taxes and other state taxes. For this reason, some lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), have proposed to simply require payroll taxes from OPT workers rather than abolishing the whole program.
Other members of Congress, such as Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), have introduced legislation that would ban the OPT program, citing “fraud” concerns raised by other conservatives. “OPT has become a magnet for fraud and a backdoor replacement for American workers. My legislation, HR 2315, rescinds OPT entirely. America First means American jobs first,” Gosar wrote in May.
Democrats in Congress, by contrast, seem opposed to changing the OPT program and broadly support it in its current form.
“You’re basically starving us of that talent that we need in some of these critical industries,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) told Migrant Insider. “If you want to reform these programs, reform them, but don’t end them.” Krishnamoorthi and Rep. Jay Obernolte (D-Calif.) have co-sponsored a bill by Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) to codify OPT into statutory law.
“We have a choice: educate the best and brightest students in the U.S. to help America succeed, or send them home to China, India, and other rivals to launch companies to compete against us,” Liccardo wrote as the reason for his bill. His district in Silicon Valley includes many of the technology companies that are the biggest employers of OPT workers.
Trump’s Threat
Efforts to abolish OPT have been a cause célèbre on the right, but few have succeeded. Legislation in Congress is unlikely to go anywhere, since many Republicans are on board with the program.
Legal efforts to abolish the program have also been unsuccessful. In 2022, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers – a union that opposes foreign workers– sued the Biden administration to invalidate the program. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the program as a valid rulemaking, and the Supreme Court denied further review.
Instead, the biggest threat could come from rulemaking. OPT is less secure than other immigration programs, like H-1B, because it was created by federal rule rather than an Act of Congress. The administration could theoretically change the regulations at any time or abolish them altogether.
Conservatives have been demanding just that. In November, Schmitt wrote to then-Secretary Kristi Noem calling on the Department of Homeland Security to rescind the OPT program.
Noem wrote back, saying that the Administration was “reevaluating” the program based on “fraud and national security concerns.” That same month, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons claimed his agency had identified “10,000 cases” of fraud in the OPT program.
The administration seems to be playing ball with Republicans in Congress. The narrative of “fraud” being constructed may be a precursor to taking action against the program. The $100,000 fee reportedly under consideration is one such action, which may severely undermine the program without abolishing it altogether.
Donald Trump’s “MAGA” base was formed primarily around opposing immigration. As time has shown, it’s not just undocumented immigrants being targeted. Nationalist conservatives want to severely cut (if not eliminate) legal immigration, too. Programs like H-1B and OPT that keep bright foreign talent in America are a threat to their vision of this country, and Trump’s second term is their window to act. The fight over OPT status has only just begun.
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Just when you think the regime couldn't do more damge!!!
Thanks for the report, Pablo.
If US had better support for K12 education, would increase the available pool for STEM high education majors.