President Donald Trump's immigration upheaval has led to scrutinizing student visas, especially work programs like Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT), which allow hundreds of thousands of international students to bypass immigration laws and potentially displace American workers. Though the programs can be valuable for foreign students to gain work experience, the visas lack oversight, are riddled with loopholes, and have been plagued by misuse and fraud. Can they be reined in? Or, with Trump wielding a pen like a hammer, will they soon cease to exist?
Student Visas – Gaming the System
These programs are supposed to give international students on F-1 visas a chance to get jobs related to their field of study. OPT requires approval from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and lets qualified people work for up to 12 months after graduation, though STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering, and math) can apply for an additional two years. CPT can only be used during a degree program and requires a job offer before a school official can authorize it. Those accepted must maintain full-time enrollment but can switch to OPT under certain circumstances.
However, many people stay longer than legally allowed. “In 2023 alone,” explained Business Today, “7,000 students from India overstayed their visas — the highest number among all countries. Brazil, China, and Colombia also reported significant overstays, contributing to a broader concern about visa abuse.” Some never even go to the school that accepted them. Once they arrive in the states, they go underground and work illegally.
Another big issue is “pretend employers,” a scheme in which aliens pay companies for false reference letters to maintain the appearance of legal OPT status. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found an estimated 4,600 foreign college graduates using this scam.
Over the years, DHS has uncovered alarming evidence of fraud and abuse in these programs. In a 2020 operation dubbed “OPTical Illusion,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 15 students who used OPT to remain illegally in the states. At a press conference, when announcing the arrests, Ken Cuccinelli, then the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, said, “Every instance of fraud is a job an American worker could have had, and with so many Americans looking for work, this crime is even more unacceptable.”
Around the same time, a joint investigation by NBC Bay Area and NBC News revealed thousands of international students may have used false employment records from more than a dozen companies potentially masquerading as legitimate employers.
The founder of one of these companies, Findream, was charged with criminal fraud in a federal court in Illinois. Findream's sole purpose was allegedly to provide “false verifications of employment” for Chinese F-1 visa holders seeking employment through OPT. In an affidavit, an FBI special agent said a website associated with Findream “described the OPT opportunity to prospective students as ‘pretend work,’” explained NBC. The website apparently claimed that “if a document submission is ‘well-prepared, it will look real’ and the U.S. government ‘will think your status is legal.’”
During the final year of Trump's first term, federal agents created the University of Farmington in Michigan, a fictitious institution used to catch fraudulent CPT users. It led to the arrest of nearly 250 foreign students and “uncovered a nationwide network that grossly exploited U.S. immigration laws,” according to a statement made by Steve Francis, a special agent in Detroit whose team took part in the operation.
Notice all these crackdowns and investigations happened before former President Joe Biden entered the White House.
Accountability?
In August 2024, Homeland Security delivered its annual “entry/exit overstay report” to Congress, revealing an estimated 565,155 total overstays in 2023. That number represents only a small percentage of that year’s visa holders, but it’s still a lot of people.
Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, delivered a report to Congress in January, illustrating why mitigating these issues is crucial:
“[T]he Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs, which were never authorized by Congress, and which have spawned an industry of diploma mills and fake schools giv[ing] cover for bogus training programs and illegal employment, should be eliminated, or much, much more closely regulated. Currently OPT and CPT are the largest guest worker programs we have, with an estimated 540,000 former students employed here, without accountability, oversight, labor condition safeguards. In addition, Congress must impose stricter standards for credentialing schools before they are allowed to issue I-20 forms to visa applicants. Schools with high rates of overstays should lose their eligibility to issue I-20s.”
Later in her testimony, she said, “The temporary work visa programs inevitably lead to distortions in the labor market and displacement of U.S. workers,” a fact that should not be overlooked. Liberty Nation News recently highlighted this problem, citing the Center of Immigrations Studies: “The number of US-born men (16 to 64) not in the labor force increased by 13.2 million from 1960 to 2024. At the same time, the number of working-age immigrant men in the labor force increased by 14.1 million.”
The Trump administration is supposedly implementing stricter regulations on student visas, such as limiting what jobs are eligible for work authorization and tightening the guidelines on participating institutions. But without a stronger foundation, these programs will likely continue to have cracks, allowing untold numbers to cheat the system and possibly edge out American workers.
