While most of the public debate around foreign labor has focused on the H-1B visa program, there’s another little-known pipeline quietly reshaping America’s workforce: Optional Practical Training (OPT).
Under OPT, foreign nationals studying in the U.S. on F-1 student visas can remain and work for U.S. companies during their studies or even after graduation. In theory, the program is supposed to give students real-world experience. In practice, it has become yet another back door for corporations to import cheaper labor, while bypassing the obligations they would have if they hired American citizens.
Here’s why: employers don’t have to pay payroll taxes on OPT workers. That means no Social Security, no Medicare, no federal unemployment insurance—an automatic 7.5% (or more) discount compared to hiring an American worker. Bloomberg once estimated the savings at closer to 15%. Multiply that by the more than 109,000 OPT workers employed in 2024, and you’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars corporations keep off the federal books each year.
The tech industry has jumped on board. Amazon alone hired over 10,000 OPT workers last year. Google, the University of California system, and hundreds of other employers also rely on this pipeline.
This program was never even approved by Congress. As Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA explained, “OPT is one of the most widely-used guest worker programs despite never being approved by Congress. Business lobbyists pitched the idea as a way around the H-1B cap, and successive administrations expanded it.”
The losers in this equation? American graduates. Thousands of young men and women leave college burdened by debt, only to find that entry-level jobs are being filled by temporary foreign workers who come with a tax discount. Even the foreign students themselves lose out, since they don’t earn the same benefits or security as U.S. hires.
Meanwhile, Big Tech and corporate interests defend the system as legal and say that any changes must come from Congress, not the agencies that administer it. But that does little to reassure families who see their children squeezed out of opportunity in favor of cheaper, temporary labor.
The OPT loophole may not be making national headlines, but it’s a perfect example of how a broken immigration system is putting Americans last.