ICE Masks the Huge Size of the OPT Foreign Worker Population
Misleading and conflicting numbers, published in obscure places
By David North on May 4, 2023
The Optional Practical Training program (OPT) for recent alien grads of U.S. universities is probably the second-largest foreign worker program in the U.S. (after H-1B) and it is heavily subsidized by the government, but it tries to hide these realities through five techniques:
It publishes misleading numbers on the size of the program. In its newly released annual report entitled “SEVIS by the Numbers”, it says on p. 2 of the summary: “There were 117,301 pre- and post-completion optional practical training (OPT) students,” with no hint that this deals with only one of the three OPT sub-programs.
It publishes three conflicting total numbers for 2022 of these student and alumni workers, in different places, with no explanation, as we describe below.
Unlike in the past, the Biden administration does not publish the numbers of Optional Practical Training Program workers by their largest employers.
It never mentions that an employer of OPT workers gets an 8 percent subsidy by not contributing via payroll taxes to our bedraggled federal trust funds for Social Security, Medicare, and the federal unemployment insurance programs — i.e., OPT employers, including many fat-cat ones, get a bonus for not hiring American workers and that bonus is funded by our elderly, our sick, and our unemployed.
Similarly, it always writes about the OPT workers as students, when most of them are alien alumni of U.S. universities, many of them two years or more out of college.
https://cis.org/North/ICE-Masks-Huge-Size-OPT-Foreign-Worker-Population
