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For years now, the H-1B debate has been sold to us as a tech-company issue or a skills argument. But what doesn’t get talked about is how much of the H-1B pipeline starts long before the lottery or the job offers and way before the actual paperwork gets filled out.
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A recent piece from the Times of India just admitted the ugly truth out loud. For many Indian families, an American student visa has zero to do with education. It’s quietly understood that the student stuff is a progression that starts with admission and a visa and moves through internships and graduation and ends with work authorization long enough to recover their costs and secure a foothold in the US job market. The degree isn’t the reason; it’s just their foot in the door.
The Times of India admits that students on F-1 visas are not primarily here for education, but jobs. That’s an admission they’re intentionally abusing the requirements of “student” visas.
Read the whole, insane, article here.https://t.co/B5eLk5DmJp
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) January 14, 2026
This matters because the entire legal structure of a student visa is about “intent.” F-1 visas are for studying, not labor. Yet now, what’s being openly described by the Times of India is a system where the “student” status is actually a way to weasel into the US job market.
And now that this little sneaky truth has been made public, the entire conversation should change. Because the US has allowed a “temporary education” visa to mutate into a backdoor work program, and that can’t stand.
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India’s media spells out how the system has been used and abused, how Optional Practical Training became the bridge to US jobs, and why Washington’s sudden turn against it could blow up the entire game, especially for those Indians who are using this path to cheat the system.
For Indian families, the US degree has rarely been just a degree. It is a sequence you pay for and plan around: Admission, visa, internship, graduation, and then a post-study runway long enough to recover costs, build a résumé, and attempt the H-1B lottery without falling off a bureaucratic cliff. That runway is Optional Practical Training (OPT).Now the runway is being described in Washington as a loophole, not a ladder. In 2025, the US debate has moved beyond generic immigration noise into something more targeted: A political and legal narrative that frames OPT as unauthorised, unfair to American graduates, and ripe for abuse. This is followed by proposals that would either terminate the programme, tax away its advantage, or convert student status from a compliance-based continuum into a clock with expiry dates. What is significant here is that OPT is being attacked simultaneously in Congress, agency memos, and in the regulatory agenda—three levers that rarely align.
India sits closest to the blast radius because they have become the most invested in the OPT logic. The story, then, is not “Will America stop Indians from studying?” It is more precise, and more destabilising: Will America continue to attach a credible work pathway to the education it markets to the world?
Now, this is where the “misuse” argument collapses and the “scam” argument starts to hold some serious water.
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What follows is sworn testimony that describes how a program meant to supplement education turned into one of the biggest work-authorization pipelines in the country. Honestly, calling it a “student visa” program is more marketing than reality. The Times of India piece goes on:
In June 2025, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee with a blunt charge: OPT, she argued, has effectively become the largest unregulated guest-worker scheme in the United States. Drawing on internal datasets she said were provided by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Vaughan told lawmakers that more than 540,000 work authorisations were granted under OPT and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) in FY2023 alone. In her framing, this was not administrative flexibility; it was regulatory drift at scale. OPT, she said, had fuelled an ecosystem of diploma mills, fake schools, bogus training programmes, and illegal employment—a parallel market built less around learning than around visa preservation and labour substitution—while the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) remained too under-resourced to vet the volume and complexity of the pipeline.
Her sharpest point was legal-constitutional in tone: OPT is not explicitly authorised by Congress, having been created through executive rulemaking—formalised under the Bush administration and expanded under Obama—without an up-or-down vote to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates to work in the US.Where her testimony lands politically is in how it converts a sprawling, messy system into a single prosecutable story: Scale plus abuse equals illegitimacy. Once OPT is narrated primarily as a work programme rather than an education-to-employment bridge, the policy debate shifts from ‘how to regulate’ to ‘whether it should exist at all’. And even if one contests her characterisation, the effect is the same: it gives restrictionists a numbers-and-oversight argument that is easier to sell than a purely ideological one.
Our student visa program is functioning as a mass employment agency.
Now, US senators are saying that the government is issuing massive numbers of work permits through a student visa system that was never meant to function that way and calling on DHS to shut it down.
The Times of India piece continues:
On September 23, 2025, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Kristi Noem, Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, urging her to end Optional Practical Training (OPT)-style work authorisations for student visa holders. Grassley argued DHS is issuing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of such work permits “in direct violation of the law” and criticised the practice of allowing foreign graduates to remain in the US on student visas “for years after graduation” to work. He said this undercuts young Americans’ job prospects and claimed the authorisations are incompatible with the Immigration and Nationality Act, which he says limits student visas to education, not employment.
On November 14, 2025, Senator Eric S. Schmitt (Republican, United States Senator for Missouri) wrote to Kristi Noem, Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, and Joseph B. Edlow, Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, urging them to move toward ‘reforming or ending’ Optional Practical Training (OPT). He calls OPT ‘one of the most abused’ immigration programmes and argues it operates as a cheap-labour pipeline and a ‘backdoor’ into the job market, hurting young American workers. Schmitt also stresses the programme’s tax advantage—citing payroll tax exemptions and claiming this encourages employers to hire OPT workers over US graduates. He asks DHS to conduct a ‘thorough review’ as the first step toward shutting OPT down or reshaping it.
What Grassley and Schmitt are both saying is that the student visa program has been allowed to function like a work visa.
Now, let’s hope that this is where all the talk turns into action. These proposals show how lawmakers are trying to unwind the student-to-work scam, either by totally eliminating OPT or taking away the backdoor access into the US job pool.
The Times of India piece shares more:
If the narrative is the pressure, the proposals are the machinery. They range from a guillotine to a slow squeeze to a procedural clock.The American Tech Workforce Act of 2025: A termination proposalThe American Tech Workforce Act of 2025, introduced in the US Senate in September and referred to the Judiciary Committee, tries to rewire the entire student-to-work pipeline:
Tighten H-1B through a tougher, higher-wage logic, and then cut off the quiet bridge that feeds it—OPT. The Bill treats Optional Practical Training not as an education policy tool but as a structural loophole that Congress never explicitly authorised and now seeks to close.
The language of the Bill is deliberately spare. In its Section 3—Termination of Optional Practical Training Program; employment authorization to terminate after completion of course of studies—the proposal is not to narrow eligibility or toughen oversight, but to erase the programme itself. OPT, and any successor scheme by another name, would be barred in law. Employment authorisation would end the moment an F-1 student completes their degree, collapsing the post-graduation runway to zero. Even pending OPT applications would be denied at enactment, with fees returned.
The message is unmistakable here: Study may still be welcomed, but work after graduation would no longer be part of the offer.The Dignity Act of 2025: A quiet rewrite of OPT economicsThe Dignity Act of 2025, a bipartisan immigration reform Bill introduced in the US House of Representatives, proposes a broad reset of immigration rules—mixing tougher enforcement tools with new legal-status pathways and system-wide adjustments. It is not law; it remains a legislative proposal moving through the committee process, not a measure that has cleared both chambers and been signed.For international students, its most consequential move is not a headline attack on OPT, but a quiet change to its economics.
The Bill proposes to end the payroll tax exemption on OPT wages by bringing those earnings under FICA—the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes that most US workers pay through automatic deductions. Under the current framework, many F-1 students on OPT who are treated as nonresident aliens for tax purposes are generally exempt from FICA withholding; the proposal would remove that carve-out.
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These proposals are about dismantling a work pipeline that’s clearly screwing over American workers… because a student visa that functions like a work visa is a total backdoor scam. And once it’s admitted out loud, everything is on the table, and changes better be made.
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