Trump Administration Moves To Crack Down on ‘Uncontrolled’ Pipeline for Foreign Workers

The Trump administration is moving to crack down on what it says has become an “uncontrolled” pipeline that has allegedly opened the door for thousands of foreign nationals to come to America and work — the Optional Practical Training programLast week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it was investigating the program, which lets foreign students work temporarily in America in their field of study. Acting ICE director, Todd Lyons, told reporters that his agency had identified more than 10,000 cases of potential fraud within OPT.On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order with the stated goal of “restoring integrity to America’s financial system.”The order, which does not mention OPT, directs the Treasury Department to develop guidance to help banks better identify potential criminal activity, such as money laundering, and requires financial institutions to consider an individual’s immigration status and employment authorization when evaluating potential financial risks. The change could make it harder for illegal immigrants who do not have proper work authorization to open bank accounts.That order comes after the acting executive associate director for Homeland Security Investigations, John Condon, said investigators found one suspect employer in New Jersey that claimed it employed 150 foreign students, but failed to “answer basic questions about who they were or what they were hired to do.”“We only encountered one of these students, who revealed he had not worked for the listed company in over a year. He was instead being trained by a company based in India,” Mr. Condon said.Mr. Lyons also told reporters that investigators found “problematic OPT employee work sites” in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey.“We’ve discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employees,” Mr. Lyons said. He added that in “many cases,” there were multiple employers that listed “small residential addresses” as the location for their operation while claiming to employ “hundreds of foreign students.”“When someone does answer the door, their statements are inconsistent or they claim no knowledge of the business,” he said.A 2014 report from the Government Accountability Office said the government did not identify any risks of fraud with OPT. The report said officials found the program was “a low-risk employment benefit” because they did not believe participants had an “incentive to jeopardize their foreign student visa status and future legal status to stay and work in the United States.”However, Mr. Lyons said the program has “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States.”To participate in the OPT program, a student has to get approval from his or her school and then file an application for authorization from the Department of Homeland Security. The program lets students work in America for 12 months, or 24 months for those in STEM fields, and allows them to transition to an H-1B visa. The Institute of International Education reported that in the 2024-2025 academic year, 294,253 students were on OPT. The OPT program has been criticized by groups that aim to limit immigration, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, CIS. The director of regulatory affairs and policy at CIS, Elizabeth Jacobs, wrote last week that the program is a “workaround to allow corporations to bypass the legal requirements that participation in a congressionally authorized guestworker program would impose.” She noted that OPT participants are “generally” exempt from payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security, which she said can decrease labor costs by 7 percent per year. She also said that the program was not created with proper authorization from Congress, as opposed to other guest work programs, such as the H-1B visa. OPT was created administratively and is managed by the Department of Homeland Security. Some Democrats in Congress are pushing a bill to prevent Mr. Trump from ending the program. In April, Congressman Sam Liccardo introduced a bill to codify OPT into law.“The OPT program enables hundreds of thousands of the best and the brightest from around the world to be educated in the United States, and to have a pathway to contribute to our economy,” Mr. Liccardo said. He added that the Trump Administration is trying to end the program and insisted it would lead to the loss of “American-trained, American-educated engineers, scientists,” and lead those students to go to America’s adversaries, such as China, for their education. However, Ms. Jacobs dismissed those concerns and said it would not keep “talented foreign graduates” from working in America, as there are other programs available, such as the H-1B visa.

Trump Administration Moves To Crack Down on ‘Uncontrolled’ Pipeline for Foreign Workers

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