Almost 1.5 million foreign students have been allowed to stay and work in the U.S. after graduation as part of a work permit program that is now larger than the controversial H-1B program for highly skilled foreign workers, according to a new report.
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The number of students authorized to work under the “optional practical training” program has grown 400 percent since the federal government in 2008 increased the amount of time graduates with tech, science and math degrees could remain in the United States and work, according to a new Pew Research analysis of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
San Jose and San Francisco are among the nation’s top destinations for graduates in the OPT program, Pew found.
The report also highlighted Northwestern Polytechnic University in Fremont, which ranked first in colleges of its type for the number of OPT participants, with 11,700 during a 12-year period. Some critics have alleged the school is a “visa mill” giving foreign students an improper path to U.S. employment, a charge the school has denied in the past.
The OPT program, which grew out of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, essentially extends F-1 education visas for foreign college and university students so they can work during or after school. The program’s base-level permit lasts for 12 months, but a STEM extension allows participants to spend an additional two years working in the U.S.
“We’ve seen this huge growth in foreign graduates staying under OPT, and most recently it has surpassed the largest temporary-employment visa program, which is the H-1B,” said Pew researcher Neil Ruiz, author of the report issued Thursday, which covers the period from 2004 to 2016.
While the H-1B program is heavily relied upon by Silicon Valley tech companies to employ highly skilled tech talent, it imposes restrictions, including an annual cap of 85,000, and requires workers to be sponsored by employers. There is no cap on the number of OPT recipients and no sponsorship requirement.
“The H-1B is harder to get,” Ruiz said, adding that OPT is often a pathway to an H-1B visa, but data is not available to show how many OPT participants receive H-1Bs.
More than half of those working under OPT from 2004 to 2016 were in science, technology, engineering and math fields, Pew found, and as a result, were eligible for the “STEM extension.” The program added a 17-month STEM extension in 2008, shortly after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates suggested it in testimony to Congress after complaining that the cap for the H-1B program had “caused a serious disruption in the flow of talented STEM graduates to U.S. companies. In 2016, another 12-month extension was added.
OPT has caught the attention of critics pushing for reduced immigration. John Miano, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, called the 2008 STEM extension a “scheme” by Microsoft to “circumvent the H-1B quotas.” The program started out giving work-experience opportunities to foreign students but has since been “transformed into a full-blown guestworker program whose stated purpose is to provide labor to American business,” Miano wrote in a September blog post for the center.
San Francisco and the East Bay attracted the fourth-largest number of OPT graduates of any metropolitan area of the country, with 65,000 workers, the report found. San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale ranked fifth, with 62,000. In the San Jose region, 83 percent of those workers had STEM degrees. The top three regions for OPT graduates were greater New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
Across the country, OPT participants in STEM fields were found to be highly educated, with 78 percent holding PhDs, 60 percent holding master’s degrees and just 33 percent having only a bachelor’s degree, Pew reported, noting that students from China, India and South Korea made up 57 percent of all OPT participants.
Most foreign students enrolled in the program attended public colleges. Among the 10 public schools with the most foreign student graduates on OPT between 2004 and 2016, none were in the Bay Area.
However, among schools accredited by organizations other than the one that oversees major universities such as UCLA, Columbia and Harvard, all of which had OPT graduates, Northwestern Polytechnic University in Fremont stood out in Pew’s analysis.
“It’s bigger than Harvard over the same period,” Ruiz said of the school’s 11,500 OPT participants. Less than 3 percent of all OPT holders came from schools like Northwestern Polytechnic that are not accredited by the organization that certifies most of the nation’s public and private non-profit colleges and universities.
Northwestern Polytechnic has been under attack over its foreign students. In March, Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security saying “multiple credible reports” suggested Northwestern “operates a visa mill.” The school was also the subject of a lengthy investigation by news website Buzzfeed in 2016, which called Northwestern an “upmarket visa mill” that used “fake grades” to graduate foreign citizens into U.S. jobs. The school denied the claims cited in that report, saying it provided a high-quality education.
In 2015, Northwestern and Silicon Valley University of San Jose denied a news report that some of their students arriving from India were deported and others were refused boarding for U.S.-bound flights because the schools were “under scrutiny” by U.S. immigration officials. Northwestern attributed travel problems to an issue with Air India. Silicon Valley University shut down in March, citing a loss of accreditation. Among institutions in its class, Silicon Valley University had the second-highest number of OPTs after Northwestern Polytechnic, with 4,500, according to Pew.
Northwestern Polytechnic did not respond to questions from this news organization about visa mill allegations, but instead provided information about its accreditation.
A third-year business student there, Jae Hyung Jung, 26, of South Korea, said he was receiving a good education that he hoped would prepare him for a management job at Palo Alto electric car maker Tesla. He said he planned to enroll in OPT and wants to stay in the U.S. permanently. “There are lots of famous Silicon Valley companies here,” Jung said.
The top public schools for graduates in the OPT program were City University of New York’s Baruch College, with 18,500; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with 13,700; and UCLA, with 13,600. The top private, non-profit schools were the University of Southern California, with 27,100; New York University, with 26,800; and Columbia University, with 22,600, Pew reported.
