Homeland security chief Kristi Noem should stop granting hundreds of thousands of work permits to foreigners for white-collar jobs needed by U.S. graduates, says Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate’s judiciary committee.
The Senator’s declaration comes amid growing recognition that U.S. graduates are losing jobs to outsourcing and the Supreme Court decides whether to consider a lawsuit that argues against work-permit giveaways.
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)… is issuing hundreds of thousands of work authorizations to student visa holders in direct violation of the law,” said Grassley’s September 23 letter, which continued:
In addition to harming American job seekers, foreign student work authorizations also put our nation at risk of technological and corporate espionage. For example, over 33,000 Chinese student visa holders have STEM work authorizations that allow them to work in sensitive tech positions. The FBI has warned that China is engaging in the “systematic theft of intellectual property” by targeting businesses and academic institutions, and the USCIS ombudsman has found that foreign student work authorizations are “currently being used by government actors from countries such as the [People’s Republic of China] as a means of conducting espionage and technology transfer.
The work-permit giveaway is carried out via two programs established by President George W. Bush, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs. Advocates claim that the work permits are just extensions of the foreign students’ in-class education and F-1 visas.
In reality, the work permits allow white-collar migrants to take hundreds of thousands of jobs, often via ethnic-hiring networks in the Fortune 500. In 2024, President Joe Biden’s DHS distributed 400,000 work permits to foreign graduates, most of whom hope the jobs can help them get H-1B visas that allow contract workers to become immigrants.
The programs effectively lock out many American graduates from professional and management careers, and allow migrants — especially Indians — to take over career-starting slots in Fortune 500 companies.
The OPT and CPT programs are two programs in a large variety of visa programs that are being used by shareholders to cut payroll costs and inflate stock values. The most famous of the visa programs is the H-1B program, which keeps roughly 750,000 migrants in U.S.-based white-collar jobs, and annually provides green cards to roughly 40,000 foreign workers. The little-known L-1 visa is rarely mentioned in the media.
Many of those migrants and former migrants now occupy senior corporate jobs and are shifting critical jobs, skills, and wealth from American communities back to India.
“The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security,” said a September 19 proclamation by President Donald Trump establishing modest curbs on the H-1B program:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
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The abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have identified and investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing companies for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States.
In his letter to DHS, Grassley noted the damage to American graduates, including many in Midwest states which are now starved for investment and opportunities because of the accelerating relocation of U.S. white-collar jobs and wealth:
I am concerned about the job prospects of young Americans. The Federal Reserve recently found that “the unemployment rate of males ages 22 to 27 is roughly the same, whether or not they hold a degree.” It also found that recent American graduates with STEM majors have higher unemployment rates than the general population. I find these employment trends deeply troubling.
Competition from foreign graduates is contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans. This should not be the case. Congress placed caps on employment visas [roughly 70,000 per year] for foreign graduates to ensure that American jobs are filled by American graduates.
However, many investors and CEOs defend the many visa programs which allow them to raise stock values by both importing cheaper workers and also exporting white-collars jobs to India and other countries. For example, every dollar cut in payroll may add $30 in stock value to NASDAQ companies, some of which is redistributed to senior executives.
Those business groups in turn exert their influence on each administration’s policies. For example, the Department of Justice is defending a long-standing claim that the Attorney General can provide work permits to foreigners via multiple programs. In August, Breitbart News reported:
“Congress authorized the Secretary to include eligibility for employment among the conditions that attach to a nonimmigrant’s admission and continued presence in this country,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a court-ordered response to a 2015 lawsuit that has been ping-ponged by four sets of judges.
The lawsuit was launched by American professionals against President Barack Obama’s 2015 decision to provide work permits to the spouses of the H-1B workers widely used to replace American professionals. Obama’s deputies justified the jobs giveaway by saying it helped companies to retain white-collar workers imported from India and other nations.
College “underemployment upon graduation is highly prevalent, and it is highly persistent,” said an August 13 report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, which added:
As much as 52 percent of college graduates are underemployed upon initial labor market entry. They are likely to stay that way — even 10 years after graduation, 45 percent of college graduates are underemployed, according to the Talent Disrupted report.
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One year out from graduation, college graduates with those kinds of [high-skilled STEM] majors have an underemployment rate of 37 percent or less, [bank researcher Oksana] Leukhina said.
Recently released DHS data show that roughly 400,000 foreign graduates have been given work permits lasting up to three years.
A February report from the New York Federal Reserve showed that huge numbers of skilled US graduates have been sidelined into “underemployment” — 20 percent of civil engineers, 44 percent of biochemistry graduates, 51 percent of business graduates, 17 percent of computer engineers, and 16.5 percent of computer science graduates.
NBC News reported in August:
Adam Mitchell thought he was doing everything right. He majored in computer science at Georgia State University and interned at State Farm doing web development. He’d been told since he was a teenager that a degree in computer science was a guaranteed path to a high-paying job right out of college.
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More than seven months after graduating, he’s applied for more than 100 jobs and gotten two interviews and only one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks, which he didn’t take because the hours would make it too hard to pursue other opportunities. Among the jobs that turned him down: an hourly role at Costco and a customer service job in the call center at State Farm.
“I’m just kind of looking for anything,” he said. “I don’t know if the tech-side economy is ever going to be the same again.”
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