Citizenship Chief Says Federal Work Permits for Foreign Grads Are ‘Depressing Wages’



by Neil Munro 19 Aug 2025

President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies allowed at least 400,000 foreign students at U.S. colleges to take U.S. white-collar jobs in 2024.

Biden’s 400,000 giveaway in 2024 was a huge 45 percent jump from the 275,000 job approvals by President Donald Trump’s deputies in 2020. Trump’s deputies had pushed the giveaways down by 7 percent from President Barack Obama’s 294,000 giveaways in 2016.

“I think it’s depressing wages, and it’s something that we need to be concerned about,” said Joe Edlow, who is President Donald Trump’s director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service agency. The agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Edlow told Breitbart News on August 11 that the OPT program “has been one of the largest programs used to get around H-1B [visa] requirement caps, to hire aliens who are graduating with STEM degrees in a way that makes me concerned that the US students coming out of the same universities are not necessarily able to find [jobs].”

Biden’s giveaway gives work permits to roughly one foreign graduate for every two Americans who graduate with a high-tech degree in 2024.

That flood of job-seeking foreign graduates sweeps many young American graduates into less productive and lower-pay careers in 2025.

The OPT and CPT Programs

The jobs giveaway is conducted via President George W. Bush’s 2008 Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. His deputies invented the program without any congressional approval and even granted employers a tax break if they hire foreigners who graduate from American universities instead of Americans who graduate from those universities.

Bush’s OPT program provides one-year work permits to foreign graduates, and an extra two years of work permits to people who graduate from Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics courses.

In 2024, roughly 640,000 foreign students and graduates had approval to get work permits, including the 400,000 who reported that they had started work.

Many of the foreigners are quickly hired into career-track jobs via discriminatory, ethnic-hiring networks in Fortune 500 companies. These ethnic hiring networks are rooted in foreign countries — such as India — but are rarely noticed by the Justice Department’s employment and civil rights lawyers.

Boring_Business
·
Aug 13, 2025

@BoringBiz_·
Follow

NYU just posted a video of where their graduates are heading to work after college

Anyone notice anything in this video?



https://twitter.com/i/status/1955643550571667777

Expended Asset
@jam3240
·
Follow

American companies don't hire Americans anymore. Only foreigners on visas.

11:20 PM · Aug 13, 2025

The number of employed foreign students is uncertain because some use the program to get fake jobs so they can remain in the United States.

The similar Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program provides one-year work permits to foreigners who are enrolled in U.S. universities. The J-1 program is also used to get many foreign students into STEM jobs in university laboratories and elsewhere.

The programs also provide an on-ramp to the H-1B visa program for up to perhaps 150,000 foreign white-collar workers each year.

Employers like the H-1B program because it allows them to reward favored and subservient foreign workers by nominating them for the massively valuable prize of U.S. citizenship. The prize is a huge incentive for foreign workers, and it costs little or nothing to the employers. Instead, the prize is funded by the American citizens who are forced to share their political power with the migrants who took their salaries and careers.

The OPT, CPT, J-1, and H-1B programs delivered roughly 400,000 new foreign graduates into U.S. jobs in 2024, even as roughly 700,000 Americans graduated from four-year colleges with degrees in STEM, health care, and business.

The foreign graduates and students are hired in vast numbers by elite companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Walmart, Apple, Tesla, Deloitte, and JPMorgan Chase.

But huge numbers of the OPT students are steered into software sweatshops to work as outsourced subcontractors for the Fortune 500. Those jobs were formerly within the Fortune 500, and were the career-starters for the many young Americans who subsequently became experts, managers, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The result is that many promising American graduates are being permanently sidelined by the Bush programs, even as artificial intelligence technologies eliminate many starter jobs.

The New York Times reported on August 10:

“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” Ms. Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views.

“I’m very concerned,” Jeff Forbes, the former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation, told the New York Times. “Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms — and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone.”

“What’s happening in America right now is young people are having increased difficulties finding jobs, finding work in their career fields, and specifically STEM fields, tech fields,” said Gabe Guidarini, a politics student and Republican organizer at the University of Dayton, Ohio. He added:

[U.S. graduates] may not know the [OPT] policy behind what they’re seeing in their everyday lives. But they are feeling the effects of it, especially engineering and STEM grads who are having a ton of difficulty finding work and being able to secure employment in the field that they spent tens of thousands dollars to get a degree.”

We’re seeing a lot of people, especially within the Republican Party and the conservative movement, start taking up this issue.

In Ohio, he said, the Chinese-run Fuyao Glass business in Ohio used the H-1B program to import Chinese specialists instead of hiring local American graduates.

“I think it’s a core issue for young people and the middle class,” Guidarini said:

It impacts their everyday lives. It impacts their livelihoods. It impacts their ability to find a job, and as a result, to buy a home, to raise kids, to have a good quality of living. That’s a huge issue for us young people, and the party that is increasingly talking about it is the Republican Party.

The huge inflow of foreign graduates into white-collar careers is also cracking the foundations of national strength by wrecking professionalism, innovation, privacy, and national security.

Many youngAmericangraduates are usingTwitter and TikTok to describe their direeconomicsituation as business officials try to blame the lack of opportunities and the layoffs on Artificial Intelligence.

Robby Starbuck
@robbystarbuck
·
Follow

"I got a PHD from Berkeley and I can’t get a job to save my life."

Random but how fun would it be to do a reality show where you have these leftists try to survive working oil rig jobs or mining jobs for 90 days?I’d definitely watch that.



https://twitter.com/i/status/1957820754872996316

11:03 AM · Aug 19, 2025

Policy Disagreements

Officials in Trump’s administration are arguing over the visa programs — including OPT, H-1B, H4EAD, J-1, L-1, and E-2 visas.

The different views are visible at the Department of Justice, Edlow’s Department of Homeland Security, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Education, the Department of State, the Department of Labor, the Federal Reserve, and within Trump’s economic strategy and among his Silicon Valley advisors.

The controversy is also splitting Trump’s supporters from his business allies.

“I need partners,” Edlow told Breitbart News, adding:

I need the Department of Labor to work with me. I need the Department of Education — if it still exists — to work with me. We’ve got to do everything we can to really make it abundantly difficult — only in certain situations — for [foreign] students to think that they are just going to continue to live and work in the United States beyond the expiration of their [F-1 student] visa.

Because, as far as I’m concerned, and I am right — OPT is not a statutory program. There is no statutory basis [from Congress] for OPT. It is a program based in regulation. Now, do I think it needs to go away completely? Maybe not.

Reporters should help government officials study in the program, said Edlow.

But the program is strongly supported by the universities that trade the OPT work permits for tuition fees, by hiring managers in many Fortune 500 companies, and by stock-maximizing investors.

The work-permit programs are also backed by India’s government, which gains huge wealth from remittances when Indians migrate to well-paying jobs throughout the United States. In 2024, almost 80,000 Indians were given the multi-year STEM OPT permits. The U.S.-India trade talks are stalled partly because of the economic impact of the visa programs on Americans.

Indian migrants tell Indian media outlets that they are worried that Trump and his deputies will investigate visa fraud by Indian-owned companies. For example, some companies sell fake jobs to wealthy migrants who exploit the OPT program to stay in the

United States:

Students in the U.S. on Optional Practical Training (OPT) are facing fresh uncertainty as authorities step up action against job consultancies [subcontractors]. These firms, which previously kept students nominally employed by issuing fake payslips and payroll records without providing real work, are now under stricter oversight.
…

“It’s terrifying,” a 26-year-old postgraduate student from Hyderabad, currently residing in Houston, told The Times of India. “I was told I had an {OPT] ‘employer’ and was receiving pay stubs, but now they’ve stopped. I don’t know what to do; finding real work at short notice is almost impossible.”

Another 25-year-old from the city, currently staying in Virginia, shared how the fabricated payroll had kept him afloat in the US. “I’ve been paying thousands in rent and tuition under the assumption that my paperwork was in order. Now I’m scrambling, with less than two months to find something genuine. I’m now looking for trustworthy consultancies.”

Agram Bagram bhooo
·
Mar 23, 2019

@S1S1B1·
Follow
@4US_Workers@Troup1998

This is just one floor of Walmart out 3 floors where 1000 and 1000 opt(bentonville, AR)students(mostly fake) are working under 20 to 30$/h and killing white color jobs.

TCS, COGNOZANT, INFOSYS, only hire Indians. How many more proof do we need. ?



https://twitter.com/i/status/1109459333023174656

JennyAround
@AroundJenny
·
Follow

You haven't seen Apple has a full building of Indian contractors yet? Google is pretty much the same now. I'm not so confident that US will win the tech war...

2:01 AM · Aug 7, 2019

“We need to study [OPT],” Edlow told Breitbart News. “We’ve got to … make sure that we’re keeping not only the employers honest, but also the [foreign] students who are utilizing it honest.”

“I hope you [in the media] hold the other people who have control over this issue as accountable,” he added.

https://www.breitbart.com/immigratio...ressing-wages/