The Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday it wants to impose a $70,000 initial fee on foreign students seeking work in the U.S. to discourage companies from relying on them for cheap labor.
The department said the program, officially known as Optional Practical Training, has become so rife with fraud that investigators can’t police it anymore.
Without the additional money, Homeland Security said it might shut down the OPT program altogether.
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“Optional Practical Training was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” the department said in a statement announcing the proposal.
OPT has exploded in popularity after changes made by the Obama administration, to the point that Homeland Security says it has become a threat to U.S. workers, particularly in science, technology and engineering jobs.
In 2024, more than 165,000 foreign students were working in those fields under OPT, or nearly double the number of foreigners admitted under the more traditional H-1B guest-worker visa.
As OPT use has grown, so has the fraud. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the program has been “flooded with participants seeking to exploit the program for improper purposes.”
Authorities busted one operation involving a Chinese businesswoman who was selling bogus employment verification documents to allow Chinese students to enroll in OPT. One person she helped was later convicted of acting as an agent of the Chinese government.
And when agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited some purported employers in an investigative sweep, they found shell companies, employers farming out foreign students to third-party companies and “evidence of international financial fraud.”
Homeland Security said more than 6,000 schools are certified to host foreign students and in 2024 nearly 200,000 students were granted work authorization as part of OPT.
But ICE’s resources to keep track of schools and students haven’t kept up.
“DHS notes that without the fees proposed in this rule, it cannot operate OPT consistent with its focus on preventing fraud and may shut down the program entirely.” Mr. Mullin said in the proposal.
The schools where students are studying would pay the fees — $70,000 for an initial application and $30,000 for a subsequent request — before a foreign student could get work authorization from Homeland Security.
Mr. Mullin said OPT was designed to be a way for students to gain real-world experience in their areas of study, but it has become a work program.
He said the fees are a way to prod schools to be more careful about which students they approve for the OPT program.
“In turn, the rule, as proposed, would effectively eliminate students who engage in OPT as a pathway for low-paid employment or those who are trying to circumvent the H-1B visa cap and fee requirements, as they would no longer be able to obtain ’automatic’ recommendations for OPT from their schools,” Mr. Mullin said in the proposal.
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