Joe Biden’s Deputies Help Foreign ‘Students’ Get Careers Needed by U.S. Graduates

A US flag flies above a building as students earning degrees at Pasadena City College part
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s deputies are quietly helping a large group of recent foreign graduates get U.S. white-collar jobs needed by American graduates.

The news was announced on February 26 via a statement largely incomprehensible to American graduates: “USCIS today announced flexibilities for certain foreign students affected by delayed receipt notices for Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization,” said the announcement from the United State Citizenship and Immigration Service Agency.

The changes were applauded by the foreign “students” who are eager for Americans’ jobs: “This is a welcome relief,” said a tweet from “Arjun K.”

And the foreign graduates are demanding more benefits, even though most are less skilled than American graduates. “We do appreciate the progress we made together last week,” tweeted Jade Wang. “But it hasn’t solved all problems, and there is a long way to go. Please take some measurements to speed up the approval or release the work permission temporarily.”

The processing delays under President Donald Trump helped protect Americans’ right to their own national labor market. MinnPost.com reported in July 2019:

“We’ve had students have job offers rescinded once the employer has waited as long as they could. It’s devastating to the student,” said Jacy Fry, director of the Kearney Center for International Student Services at Mankato State.

The job-giveaway is made via the little-known Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and matching Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program. In 2019, the two fraud-ridden programs provided work permits to roughly 400,000 mid-skilled and inexperienced foreign graduates for a wide variety of white-collar starter jobs — so helping to push 100,000s of American graduates out of technology, science, health care, and business jobs that could help them launch careers and earn a good living. 

Foreigners get the OPT work permits and the jobs by first enrolling in American universities — regardless of how many Americans send taxes or tuition to the same universities to earn the degrees they need for careers.

Media interviews spotlight the foreign graduates’ sense of entitlement to Americans’ jobs and the labor market. CNBC reported February 19:

Shantanu, 33, received his Ph.D. in structural biology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in December. His OPT application arrived on Nov. 17 and he didn’t receive a filing receipt until Feb. 11. He’s still waiting for work authorization and is unable to start his postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“We invest a lot of time coming to the U.S., working in the U.S. and contributing to the U.S.,” said Shantanu, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “And after a while, when we are treated like this, it makes us wonder why we chose the U.S. in the first place.”

The programs deliver many nurses, therapists, doctors, and other healthcare workers into Americans’ jobs. CNBC reported: “Ji Hyun came to the United States from South Korea to pursue her dream of becoming an intensive care unit nurse … ‘We’re not here to steal jobs. We are here to help the economy and find our dream. It’s not to harm you or anything,’ she said. ‘We’re just trying to be here and live with everybody and have a normal life like everybody else.'”

Many American science grads do not get their desired careers after paying U.S. universities for tuition and degrees. But Taiwanese worker Wei Chen complained to CNBC: “My other peers are already doing research, experiments, publishing their results. During this time, the only thing I can do is wait.” Chen has been in the United States for five years.

The comments show that the foreigners are using their student visas to smuggle themselves into U.S. careers, said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “They didn’t choose the U.S. to come to study and return home — they chose the U.S. to live and work,” he said.

The OPT and CPT programs get little publicity. Many immigration reporters do not have the editorial approval to show immigration’s impact on Americans — even on the reporters’ college-graduate friends, families, and peers.

The OPT program is strongly supported by business groups, but also by the universities, in part, because the universities get roughly $40 billion a year in tuition fees from foreign graduates who want to work in American careers.

Some OPT workers are hired from college into good jobs at elite firms, such as Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft, often via ethnic hiring networks. Once hired at elite firms, the selected graduates are typically nominated for a place in the H-1B visa program, allowing them to eventually get the huge prize of green cards.

For example, Intel has hired 6,591 foreign graduates since 2003, and Amazon has hired 12,173 foreign graduates with OPT work permits since 2003. Since 2003, Amazon has also hired 9,302 pre-graduate CPT workers, while Intel has hired 6,453 CPT workers, so helping to completely change the demographics of the company’s workforce.

Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. The newspaper provides very little coverage of the Bezos work permit programs.

But most OPTs get low-profile, mid-skill, low-wage gig worker jobs at the many low-status outsourcing subcontractors that were created to help the Fortune 500 companies hire foreign graduates in place of Americans.

Few of the OPT and CPT gig workers complain about their lower-wage jobs because CEOs can fire them at will — or instead nominate them for the H-1B program and sponsor them for the prize of green cards.

Jay Palmer closely monitors this layered hiring system in his role as a human rights advocate for migrants, visa workers, and trafficked workers.

U.S. college graduates owe so much in student loans that have to work for at least $45,000 or $50,000, but the OPT worker “will come out and work for $30,000 because of the poverty levels back in their home country,” he told Breitbart News, adding:

They’ll work for 30 percent to 40 percent less than Americans can work and drive American salaries down and drive the [U.S.] college students out of work.

The [OPTs] will live very cheaply, sometimes five and seven and eight to a house. They will send their money back to their country, for example, India, Slovenia, Croatia, or China or Vietnam, Venezuela, or other countries. So it is not helping the economy because they’re not spending money here .. tax receipts decline, municipalities lose out.

And the [employers] are paying them on 1099s. The majority of them on 1099s never file their taxes. This is a huge scheme that I know that the State Department and Department of Labor is looking at. The Fortune 500 companies have their master services agreements with third-party contractors and are saying that they’re not liable for this.

If a company hires an American college graduate, the company has to pay employment tax, unemployment tax, Social Security taxes, pay their health care, all of the normal benefits. But if they hire an OPT worker, they’re hiring them through a third-party contractor, paying them on 1099s, without benefits or taxes. So their rate of return [per employee] is about 80 percent higher. They save up to 28 percent just by not paying benefits.

And the [subcontractor hourly] rates are lower. If the rate [paid by the Fortune 500 company to the subcontractor] is $50 an hour [per graduate], the workers probably end up maybe getting $20 an hour, and the subcontractors pocket the difference. That scheme is known as the layer system.

The layer system is also used to hide the Fortune 500’s hiring of white-collar illegal aliens, such as former OPT workers who overstayed their visas, he added.

Many of the OPT workers are so exploited that they can sue for unpaid pay and for green cards, said Palmer. “This falls under the [2008] Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the forced labor section. It is a very short section, about a half a page … so under the law it’s human trafficking.”

Palmer works with the Weiser Law Firm in Pennsylvania.

Overall, the layer system of U.S. companies and contractors employs roughly one million foreign graduates in a wide variety of career-starting jobs needed by Americans. This huge “Green Card Workforce” helps push Americans aside, reduces average salaries, suppresses the workplace clout of American professionals, and prevents the emergence of American-run companies that could threaten elite control over the tech sector.

It also prevents American graduates from getting starter jobs in the careers they trained for at American universities. A 2014 study by the Center for Immigration Studies reported:

  • Only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree holding a job actually work in a STEM occupation.

  • There are more than five million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations: 1.5 million with engineering degrees, half a million with technology degrees, 400,000 with math degrees, and 2.6 million with science degrees.

“The nation graduates more than two times as many STEM students each year as find jobs in STEM fields,” Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers University, wrote in 2013.

President Joe Biden’s pending amnesty would dramatically expand the inflow of foreign graduates into American jobs. The bill would allow Fortune 500 companies to offer green cards to an unlimited number of foreign recruits in exchange for just ten years of indentured work in lower-wage jobs. The bill is also backed by university groups, including the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

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