Some honeymoons last a lifetime. Others are over before they begin.

For the unlikely coalition between Donald Trump’s MAGA base and his tech baron allies, the situation resembles the latter. It was inevitable that the irreconcilable differences between them would surface eventually, and it was the most obvious one when it did: immigration, the issue that put Trump back into the White House.

At the heart of the division were remarks made by tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom champion “high-skilled” foreign labor. That wouldn’t have gone down well with the MAGA base anyway, but Ramaswamy impressively stepped in it with both feet. He argued, in essence, that there aren’t enough qualified Americans to fill the jobs of tomorrow, while Musk defended the practice as critical to America’s dominance on the global stage. Musk specifically praised the H-1B visa worker program and said he would “go to war” to defend it. Of course, the people he’d find on the other side of the ramparts would be the immigration hardliners who are also some of Trump’s staunchest backers. In the end, Trump sided with Musk and Vivek in a series of public statements and shows of support on Truth Social.

The H-1B visa that took front and center during this spat has long been understood as a way to displace Americans with foreign workers who are all too often overworked and underpaid by rapacious employers. But there is another visa that is in some ways worse than the H-1B and less well-known. It’s called Optional Practical Training for foreign students with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, or STEM OPT. This program directly affects college grads and white-collar professionals—the skilled workers Musk and Vivek claim we don’t make enough of anymore.

Unlike the H-1B program, STEM OPT is not subject to an annual cap on the number of new authorizations per year, nor does it feature effective guardrails to prevent abuse. Indeed, in September, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) revealed that the government has systematically failed to stop it from being used to hurt American workers. 

“It can be revealed here that [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) has been misleading the American public since the creation of the program in 2016,” wrote Jon Feere, the director of investigations at CIS.

Both the H-1B visa and OPT program grew out of the enormous Immigration Act of 1990. Shortly after its passage, the federal government also granted work authorization to F-1 student visa holders for up to a year after graduation. Before then, since at least 1947, foreign students could sign up for “practical training” for six months if that work was recommended or required by their schools. A similar program came into being by the 1980s. However, what the Immigration and Naturalization Service did after the enormous overhaul in 1990 was officially formulate and launch the Optional Practical Training program, which gave foreign students employment latitude that they had not previously enjoyed. 

In their book Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano noted that regulators quietly modified the program so as to transform it into just another guest work visa. No congressional debate or public scrutiny was necessary. Indeed, during the early aughts, tech companies aggressively lobbied then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to that end. In a letter sent to Chertoff on Nov. 15, 2007, Microsoft lobbyist Jack Krumholtz wrote, “I appreciated very much the chance to speak with you recently at the dinner that Ed and Debra Cohen hosted to discuss immigration reform issues.” The Cohens were at that time one of Washington’s wealthy and influential couples, with Ed being a powerful real estate lawyer and his wife, Debra, being the daughter of Washington Nationals baseball team owner Ted Lerner. 

Krumholtz, who had apparently connected with Chertoff on the issue during a fancy dinner party, reminded him in his correspondence of their private discussion that DHS could “easily and immediately” take action “to help address the H-1B visa shortage” by waving a wand and extending OPT from one year to 29 months. And that was exactly what DHS ended up doing, specifically as a way to bypass Congress’s limits on H-1B visa.

Students from abroad who are studying in the United States are generally expected to leave after graduation, and some of them will try to change their visa status to that of an H-1B foreign worker to avoid that. The H-1B visa acts as a step toward permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship. However, the process takes time, and there is an annual H-1B visa cap. Enter STEM OPT, an extension of the OPT program.

STEM OPT offers an additional two years of work authorization to foreign students who hold STEM degrees. That means qualifying students get a total of three years of work authorization. CIS reports that there are currently 122,101 foreign students with work authorization under STEM OPT. 

In its OPT extension volume estimate, the Bush administration anticipated that only about 12,000 students would apply in an average year for work authorization. Three years after it went into effect, there were 72,116 new STEM OPT extensions during a single fiscal year, according to CIS.

STEM OPT was consciously created as a way to get around H-1B restrictions. In his letter to Chertoff, Microsoft’s Krumholtz argued that because “OPT exists solely by regulation,” no statuary change would be necessary to create an extension, which he claimed was necessary due to the “H-1B cap crisis” and the allegedly perennial (and mythical) STEM worker shortage. Microsoft founder Bill Gates himself said in a March 2008 testimony that extending OPT would help to “alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage.”

Put simply, STEM OPT was always meant to be a way for employers to have a steady supply of cheap, pliable labor, and that’s exactly what it became. It doesn’t even include the same, albeit flawed, wage protections as the H-1B visa, despite its intimate relationship with it. According to the CIS report published in September, there has been a systemic pattern of nonenforcement and outright indifference from DHS toward conducting a wage analysis—designed to prevent harm to U.S. workers—as required by regulation. 

The point of conducting a wage analysis is to protect Americans from being passed over by employers looking to pad their bottom lines by availing themselves of cheap labor. The H-1B program uses the prevailing wage requirement to that end. The Department of Labor defines the prevailing wage as “the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.” 

It’s better than nothing, but it’s still a flawed system. In 2021, the Economic Policy Institute reported that thousands “of skilled migrants with H-1B visas working as subcontractors at well-known corporations like Disney, FedEx, Google, and others appear to have been underpaid by at least $95 million.”

“Victims include not only the H-1B workers but also the U.S. workers who are either displaced or whose wages and working conditions degrade when employers are allowed to underpay skilled migrant workers with impunity,” according to the institute.

Despite STEM OPT being conceived as a way to get around annual limits on H-1Bs, it does not feature the same wage requirement system. Instead, the government used an ill-defined “commensurate wage” that employers must attest that they will honor. Moreover, unlike the H-1B wage standard, it does not have a built-in penalty process for violations. Employers who falsify information related to the attestation are threatened with perjury charges, but CIS found no evidence that ICE has ever attempted to prosecute a STEM OPT employer for perjury.

Beyond being able to get away with paying lower wages, in some cases employers can receive attractive tax breaks for hiring a STEM OPT participant. In other words, the U.S. government is providing employers with incentives to hire non-Americans. This issue briefly came to the fore in 2019 after Boeing airplanes suffered a series of catastrophic failures, and The Atlantic reported that the company had outsourced some software development tasks to “recent college grads earning as little as $9 an hour, who were employed by an Indian subcontractor set up across from Seattle’s Boeing Field.” While it was never confirmed, that description fits the bill for STEM OPT workers. The best and brightest these are not.

It has become fashionable among Republicans and conservatives to wholeheartedly embrace the narrative of decline, in particular with regard to American educational attainment and culture. There is some truth to this story. The downside of swallowing that explanation entirely is that we risk appearing to say we are no longer capable of producing people with the right stuff. Then the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy can argue that they must import workers under the pretext that American employers need them to fill the jobs Americans are just too dumb to do. There is a legitimate case that America can benefit from selective, high-skilled immigration, particularly from Europe—but that is not what the tech bros have in mind. 

What they want is a pliable and cheap workforce. They are simply gambling on right-wingers not noticing that their views do not fundamentally differ from the globalists conservatives have spent years excoriating. But Americans being replaced by H-1B or STEM OPT workers is no less evil, regardless of whether it is done by the hand of Elon Musk, or George Soros.     ◆