The College Lie: How Washington’s Visa Loopholes Hand Good Jobs To Foreign Workers

News on the economy is all over the place, but a solid thread runs through it: many recent American college graduates can’t find jobs. Not only are employers not hiring, they’re laying off left and right. Amazon and United Parcel Service are each cutting more than 14,000 jobs, and the Wall Street Journal says tens of thousands of white-collar jobs are being cut at other companies.

Yet at the same time, the U.S. immigration system permits thousands of foreign college graduates to enter the job market in direct competition with Americans. Companies employing them don’t have to pay the same payroll taxes as they do when hiring American citizens and permanent residents. This gives foreign students an unfair advantage over American graduates.

The program allowing foreign graduates to work is called Optional Practical Training (OPT). It was started decades ago by the administrative state through regulation, without any express congressional authorization. Over time, and through collusion between Washington and large employers, OPT was expanded into a pathway for foreign students who completed their studies to remain working for years, or indefinitely, in the U.S. while seeking permanent residence.

Given the brutal job market, the underlying premise for OPT no longer applies. Why allow masses of temporary foreign students to remain in the U.S. and enter the work force right out of college when your own graduates can’t get jobs? The argument for eliminating this program has never been stronger. As Lora Ries argues, we need to “allow American students and American workers a fair shake at applying for jobs, being interviewed for jobs, being hired for jobs, and being retained at their jobs.”

Unemployment of college graduates aged 23-27 is a few percentage points higher than the national average of 4%. The long-term unemployment rate (more than 6 months out of work) in the country for that age group is 26%, the highest in three years. And of those college graduates who are employed, over half are working in jobs that don’t require a degree.

It’s fair to argue that many recent graduates got degrees that are patently useless in a tight market. Anything ending in “studies” comes to mind, or mass-produced degrees from diploma mills whose quality is not respected by employers. But graduates with the vaunted Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math degrees are faring badly, too. Graduate unemployment for computer engineering graduates was 7.5%, and for physics it was 7.8%.

The reasons for the sudden drop in demand for educated workers are unclear. One cause is that companies are searching for efficiencies and cutting costs in a competitive market. Another major factor is the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Companies are using AI to streamline their business models from top to bottom, which means they are replacing humans with bots.

Labor-saving robots, now supercharged with AI, are a threat to traditional pathways into the labor market for people. Amazon has over a million of them doing warehouse and shipping work formerly done by people.

We don’t know how the deployment of AI is going to play out. Maybe it will exponentially increase productivity, and we’ll end up in a cashless, Star Trek world where no one works unless they want to. Maybe the machines will take over and wipe us out, as in the Terminator movies. Or maybe AI will be just one more leap forward, like the printing press, electricity, or the internet, that requires a massive adjustment of our labor force and economy.

Whatever the future holds, it is the primary responsibility of the generations who hold the money and power – that’s mostly Baby Boomers and Generation X – to take care that a pathway still exists for coming generations to get jobs and houses, start families, and have a chance to prosper. Student visas for foreign nationals, the OPT program, and work visas are not set in stone. They can be adjusted or even eliminated when the domestic conditions make them unjustifiable.

Congress should end the OPT program while we figure out how to employ, or retrain, the rising graduate workforce of American citizens. Joseph Edlow, head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he wants to “remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school.” That’s a good start.

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Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Books.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.