Immigration Expert: Government Program Incentivizes Employers to Discriminate Against Citizen College Grads

David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and noted scholar on immigration and its influence on domestic policies, said at the National Press Club this week that a government program cooked up during the George W. Bush administration and put into place through a federal regulation encourages U.S. businesses to hire foreign instead of citizen college graduates.

North also said at the panel discussion, hosted by CIS, that millions of dollars a year is diverted from helping Americans to benefiting F-1 student visa holders and the American companies that hire them.

The students, North said, get to work for one year or more at an American business, and the business that hires them gets a discount under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) protocol that allows them not to pay certain payroll taxes for their non-immigrant, non-citizen employees.

“You shouldn’t take money from America’s elderly, give it to fat cat corporations so that they can discriminate against Americans,” North said. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

Colleges and universities are also eager to accept foreign students because of the money their enrollment brings in, both as students and alumni.

At any given time, experts estimate that more than one million students from foreign countries are studying in the United States.

North wrote about OTP for CIS in 2015:

The program that converts foreign college graduates back to foreign students by a wave of a bureaucratic wand had these negative impacts on residents of the United States:

• It denied American workers more than 430,000 jobs during the years 2009-2013; and

• It removed $4 billion from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

In 2017, CIS explained how OPT works in reality:

OPT is an example of the administrative state run amok. Instead of law coming from Congress, we have law coming from bureaucrats working hand-in-hand with lobbyists. OPT also illustrates the slippery-slope problem of regulation. Work on student visas started innocently as an integral part of a course of study to give foreign students an experience not available in their home country, but eventually was transformed into a full-blown guestworker program whose stated purpose is to...

Read More HERE