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While the right has been laser-focused on the H-1B visa disaster—thanks to an online clash between MAGA, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy—another, maybe more insidious issue has been festering right under our noses: the widespread exploitation of student visas.

RELATED: Turns out the H-1B ‘lotto system’ is totally and completely rigged…

Each year, the US issues about half a million student visas, creating a tsunami of cash for progressive, Marxist universities that brainwash young people with twisted woke ideologies.

The truth is, many of these woke Marxist institutions would struggle to keep their doors open without this steady flow of mediocre foreign students.

In other words, the foreign student visa program is funding our nation’s demise.

Needless to say, there are some rather “scary” characters living in our country on F-1 visas.

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The truth is, we need to stop ignoring this massive issue and start paying attention before it gets even worse.

Let’s start by breaking down the two visa scandals at the heart of this issue:

What is an H-1B visa?

Wikipedia:

The H-1B is a visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H), that allows United States employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. It is the largest visa category in the United States in terms of guest worker numbers.

And what exactly is an F-1 student visa all about?

Boundless:

The F-1 visa allows a student to temporarily live in the United States for a defined period of time while studying at a school, college, seminary, or conservatory.

For many students, the chance to study in the United States is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication. Unless the person is already a U.S. citizen or green card holder, all prospective students will have to apply for a visa to study in the United States.

Because there are so many courses and places to study in the United States, the F-1 visa has a pretty broad application but also some very clear rules. The first is that you have to be coming to the United States with the intent to temporarily study. In other words, this is not an immigrant visa.

That sounds great, right? All neat and tidy, wrapped up in a bow. But the reality is much darker. The truth is, the F-1 student visa is one of the most abused visas in the entire system. Not only are these mediocre students overstaying their welcome and becoming “illegals,” but let’s not forget—the money from these foreign visas is directly fueling the left’s woke agenda.

Center for Immigration Studies:

There are four ways that the foreign student program is used that are contrary to the public interest. The program is subject to both retail (one at a time) abuse by foreign students and wholesale (illegals in bunches) abuse, and the program is also subject to severe distortion both by individual institutions and, most importantly, by the administration.

Retail Abuse. While most foreign students actually study in the States, others, once they are admitted, scamper into illegal status. Still others study for a while, maybe years, and then drift into the underground labor market. All of this happens one alien at a time, but, over the years, the numbers become large. Unless one of these visa abusers commits a crime, he or she is highly unlikely to be bothered by DHS.

Wholesale Abuse. A much smaller, but more dramatic, problem occurs when a marginal educational institution decides to let in large groups of “students” who pay some fees to the entity and then disappear into the illegal alien population. These so-called “visa mills” often have a small, legitimate study program and a list of faculty members, but many to most of those enrolled are busy seeking or holding down illegal jobs.

I have watched and, in one case, visited, these entities over the years and the five most prominent recent candidates for the title “visa mill” had the same configuration: All said that they were teaching high-tech subjects, all had a predominantly Indian student population, and all were Chinese-owned or -operated.

Four of these are in the Bay Area of California and a fifth, the University of Northern Virginia, operated out of an English basement in a small office building (with many other tenants) in Annandale, Va., near Washington. This “university”, which operated for years, had a grand total of four classrooms. SEVP denied it the I-20 issuing authority, but only after the equally sleepy Commonwealth of Virginia regulatory body had yanked its state license.

It gets even worse, folks. The F-1 student visa program, intended for education, has morphed into a system that actively hurts American college grads. Some shady schools exploit the system by offering minimal or no real education, letting foreign students qualify for the government’s Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. OPT allows these students to work full-time jobs under the guise of being “students,” giving employers massive tax breaks—up to $12,000 per worker—for hiring them over equally or more qualified Americans. See how this works? It’s all tied together.

And this cycle creates an unfair advantage for foreign grads, costs Social Security and Medicare well over a billion dollars each year, and also serves as a backdoor pipeline to H-1B visas, leaving American grads at the bottom of the priority list. The CIS piece goes on:

Institutional Distortion. This is a grey area. The F-1 program is supposed to be about education. But some DHS-licensed entities provide nothing but graduate degrees and only hold classes on weekends. Since they are in graduate school, all of the students are automatically and instantly eligible for the DHS-created OPT program, to be discussed shortly, allowing them to take on full-time, Monday-to-Friday jobs. This sounds like a disguised foreign worker program to me.

Other borderline institutions have this approach to their F-1 drop-outs: If the former student keeps paying tuition they are not reported to DHS, whether they are attending class or not. If they do not pay, they get reported.

Distortion by the Administration. Perhaps the most harmful part of the foreign student program has nothing to do with aliens breaking the rules — it deals with the government’s creation, out of whole cloth, of the OPT program without a shred of congressional input.

The Optional Practical Training program was invented by the second Bush administration and then enlarged and promoted by the Obama administration. It waves a magic wand and converts college grads back into college students, and then makes it possible for those ex-students to work in the United States outside the parameters of all the foreign worker programs. Further, it gives the employers of OPTs a substantial tax break for hiring OPT alumni rather than hiring an equally, or more qualified, resident college grad at the same basic salary.

The tax break, of as much as $12,000 to the employer (and an equal amount for the alien ex-student), comes because payroll taxes are not charged against “student” workers. Were the employer to hire a citizen or a green card holder (or an H-1B) worker, the normal FICA and Medicare taxes would be in effect. This not only creates an uneven playing field for American college grads, it prevents an estimated payment of more than $1 billion a year into the trust funds for the elderly.

Some unaccredited colleges in the US are nothing more than visa mills, using loopholes to make millions while bringing in foreign workers under the pretense of education. Schools like Tri-Valley University enroll mostly foreign students, charge them thousands for a “degree,” and barely hold any real classes—some only meet three weekends a semester.

They’re basically selling legal permission to live and work in the US instead of offering actual education. These shady schools are all about making money, not teaching, and they’re flooding the country with foreign workers while flying under the radar.

Chronicle:

But a Chronicle investigation suggests that Tri-Valley is only the beginning. Other colleges—most of them unaccredited—exploit byzantine federal regulations, enrolling almost exclusively foreign students and charging them upward of $3,000 for a chance to work legally in the United States. They flourish in California and Virginia, where regulations are lax, and many of their practices—for instance, holding some classes on only three weekends per semester—are unconventional, to say the least. These colleges usher in thousands of foreign students and generate millions of dollars in profits because they have the power, bestowed by the U.S. government, to help students get visas.

While these institutions are well-known among Indian students looking to work full time, they have managed to go mostly unnoticed in the United States. That anonymity is just fine with Daniel Ho, the owner of the University of Northern Virginia, an unaccredited college that has called itself the most popular American university for Indian students. Says Mr. Ho: “We don’t want people to know us.”

Visitors to Tri-Valley University’s Web site are told of the “championship golf courses and fine vineyards” that surround the campus in Pleasanton, outside San Francisco, not to mention the “gentle hills” and “historical oaks.” Students will receive “fluent and skilful [sic] capability of practical application tool.” In a section listing reasons to attend Tri-Valley, supposedly the most frequent comment from students is “It seems too good to be true, but it is very TRUE!”

According to immigration officials, Tri-Valley was too good to be true. The federal complaint against the university accuses Susan Xiao-Ping Su, Tri-Valley’s president and founder, of running a scheme that charged students tuition but didn’t make them attend class. In essence, the complaint says, Ms. Su was selling permission to live and work in the United States on student visas. Ms. Su denies this, and a number of former Tri-Valley students say they were taking classes and believed the university was legitimate.

But it’s not just these unaccredited, shady “universities” cashing in on the scam. It seems like everyone wants a piece of the pie.

Inside Higher Ed:

Portland State University isn’t the type of institution one would expect to have much name recognition outside Oregon, let alone thousands of miles across the Pacific. Yet a few years ago, the mostly local-serving public university began attracting an unusually large number of international applicants, primarily from India and Bangladesh.

The university’s leaders were pleasantly surprised: for a regional public college that relies heavily on tuition revenue, full-paying international students can play a big role in meeting enrollment goals. Last year Portland State accepted 46 international students from India and Bangladesh and received deposits from 20 of them.

RELATED: Stephen Miller just sent a thinly veiled warning to the America Last tech faction…

The student visa system has become a massive loophole, exploited by shady individuals and universities looking to cash in. These schools, once symbols of knowledge and merit, now rely on mediocre foreign students to keep their doors open. It’s a cash cow, and they’re milking it for all it’s worth, dragging down our education system and hurting American jobs in the process. And it doesn’t stop there—the F-1 and H-1B programs feed into each other, creating a pipeline packed with fraud. Both are being used to prioritize foreign workers over Americans, and it’s time to overhaul the entire system to stop these loopholes from working against us and our America First movement.

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