The United States has built a strange immigration machine: a vast, opaque apparatus that quietly rearranges the labour market without a single vote in Congress. Every so often someone turns on the lights. That is what Senator Eric Schmitt has just done with a recent X thread and letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, urging them to overhaul—or simply end—the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.

OPT began as a "work benefit" stapled onto the F-1 student visa. In theory, a foreign student may work up to 12 months after graduation, or up to three years in "STEM" (a notoriously fluid label) fields, to gain "practical training." In practice, as Schmitt notes, this has metastasised into a shadow guest-worker system: no numerical caps, no labour-market test, no prevailing-wage rules, and essentially no congressional oversight at all.

Worse, OPT workers and their employers are exempt from Social Security, Medicare and federal unemployment taxes. Under existing tax law, a foreign student "temporarily present" in the United States does not pay FICA, and neither does his employer. The combined employer–employee rate is 15.3 percent of wages. One careful estimate, using DHS’s own numbers, finds that in 2023 alone more than 539,000 foreign students with work authorization under OPT, STEM-OPT or CPT generated over 4.1 billion dollars in foregone payroll tax revenue.

This is not a level playing field; it is a state-created subsidy for replacing American graduates. As Schmitt dryly recounts, Senator Chuck Grassley once calculated that employers get an 8 percent cost advantage by hiring an OPT worker instead of a citizen or green-card holder. The result is entirely predictable. ICE’s own "Top Employers of OPT & STEM-OPT Students" tables show blue-chip firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta at the top of the list, each hiring thousands of foreign graduates every year through this tax-advantaged pipeline. (Amazon alone employs over ten thousand.) These are not startups desperate for one rare rocket scientist; they are huge corporations using a cost-arbitrage opportunity.

The defenders of this system repeat the same incantation: "worker shortages." We are told that there simply are not enough Americans who can code, engineer or analyse data. Yet the labour-market data Schmitt cites tell a different story. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recent physics graduates now suffer one of the very highest unemployment rates of any major—higher than most humanities fields, and more than double some of them. Computer engineering, computer science and information systems also sit near the top of the unemployment table.

The sheer scale of the foreign-student complex has quietly transformed higher education. DHS’s SEVIS data show roughly 1.5 million foreign students in the country (F-1 and M-1 combined), more than a third of whom already have U.S. work authorization through some version of "practical training".   Open Doors data, cited in Schmitt’s letter and illustrated in the chart he circulated, show the total number of international students hitting an all-time high in 2023/24 after a 7 percent year-on-year jump. At elite campuses, foreign students routinely make up 20–30 percent of enrolment; at Columbia and NYU, the shares approach or exceed 40 percent.

Why? Follow the money. Foreign students usually pay full freight, often at higher tuition rates. Universities, especially second-tier or financially stressed institutions, have every incentive to recruit as many as possible. And because OPT and its cousin, Curricular Practical Training, dangle the lure of American work authorization, the universities function as de facto labour brokers: "Come study here, and we will help you get a job in the United States."

Once you design a system like this, you also create a flourishing ecosystem of scams. Schmitt’s letter points to the rise of "visa mills"—nominal colleges whose real business model is selling immigration benefits rather than education. Investigations into the broader tech-visa world show just how ugly this can get: labor brokers luring Indian programmers with promises of US jobs, withholding wages, suing them for "damages" if they quit, and using the constant threat of deportation as leverage. Some of those cases involve H-1B rather than OPT, but they illustrate a simple rule: when you create a large, poorly policed temporary-worker pool that is utterly dependent on employer goodwill, abuse is not an aberration; it is the business model.

Even if OPT were perfectly policed, there would remain the deeper problem that worries Schmitt: legitimacy. Americans never voted for this program. Congress did not debate it, design it or approve it. OPT was created and later expanded by unelected officials via regulation, working hand-in-glove with universities and corporate lobbyists.

What, then, should be done?

First, DHS should do what it has the authority to do: rescind the OPT and STEM-OPT regulations and wind down the program. If Congress believes there is a genuine, narrow need for post-study training for foreign students, it can legislate a tightly capped program that is subject to normal visa rules and labour protections. Until then, there is no reason to maintain an uncapped shadow guest-worker scheme whose primary beneficiaries are multinational corporations and tuition-hungry universities.

Second, as an interim measure during any phase-out, the department should adopt the Trump-era proposal developed inside ICE: one six-month period of practical training, total, only for programs where such training is an integral, required part of the curriculum for all students, American and foreign alike. That would restore the original educational logic and sharply curtail its use as a back-door work visa.

Third, Congress should end the FICA and FUTA tax exemptions for foreign-student employment. If, for political reasons, some version of OPT limps on, at minimum it should not be subsidised by the Social Security and Medicare systems that our own workers and employers fund.

Finally, Republicans should see OPT for what it is: a symbol of a broader betrayal. A serious party of the Right is obliged to defend its own young against a system that treats them as disposable in their own country. Senator Schmitt is right to demand that this executive-created, corporatist contraption be shut down. The administration should listen.

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