Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar is offering for consideration once again legislation that would terminate the Optional Practical Training (OPT) Program which circumvents the H-1B visa cap. Gosar’s bill, H.R. 2315, the Fairness for High-Skilled Americans Act, aims to end the unfair favoring of foreign workers.
The Optional Practical Training program is a guest worker program administered by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service that was never authorized by Congress and was expanded by three years by the Obama Administration. OPT circumvents the H-1B cap by allowing over 100,000 aliens admitted as foreign students to work for up to three years in the United States after graduation.
According to the Pew Research Center, the OPT program grew by 400% between 2008 and 2016 with 1.5 million foreign graduates of U.S. schools who used the program.
These foreign workers are exempt from payroll taxes making them at least 10-15 percent cheaper than a comparable American worker. NumbersUSA reports OPT costs the Social Security and Medicare trust fund $4 billion annually.
Gosar first introduced the Fairness for High-Skilled Americans Act in the 116th Congress and has twice signed amicus briefs in support of American workers in their lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to eliminate OPT.
The Fairness for High-Skilled Americans Act does not prohibit F-1 students from working in the United States while in school. It simply terminates an unauthorized and unfair program that allows F-1 students to remain in the United States for another three years following the completion of their education.
“The OPT program completely undercuts American workers, particularly higher-skilled workers and recent college graduates, by giving employers a tax incentive to hire inexpensive, foreign labor under the guise of student training,” said Gosar in a press release. “Never authorized by Congress, OPT circumvents the H-1B visa cap set by Congress by allowing over 100,000 aliens admitted into our country on student visas to continue working in the United States for another three years after completing their academic studies.”
“OPT incentivizes greedy businesses to fire Americans and replace them with inexpensive foreign labor by avoiding having to pay FICA and Medicare payroll taxes and other employee benefits. The OPT program completely abandons young Americans who have spent years and tens of thousands of dollars pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics only to be pushed out of those fields by cheap foreigners,” argued the fiery Gosar. “Our government should not be incentivizing foreign employees over Americans. This badly flawed government program should be eliminated.”
