Feds Provide Almost $2 Billion in Subsidies to Hire Alien Grads Rather than U.S. Grads

The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, in which the American government pays American employers to discriminate against American workers has grown rapidly in recent years, and during FY 2017 it used nearly $2 billion swiped from trust funds for the elderly to favor 240,000 alien college grads over an equal number of U.S.-resident grads.

It is hard to believe, but true; employers of foreign students who have a degree from a U.S. institution are given an 8.25 percent tax break if they hire an alien, rather than a U.S. college grad with the same skills, and paid at the same salary, as we described in some detail in a recent posting.

When we wrote the prior article, we were working with out-of-date numbers; subsequently we secured estimated FY 2017 data that shows that some 240,000 American workers are adversely impacted by this program (shouldered out of jobs by the subsidized aliens); earlier data set that number at 140,000.

The subsidies to hire the foreign alumni are extracted from the Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance Program trust funds and were estimated to be in the area of $1.155 billion in that article. It is now clear that in FY 2017 the total subsidies came to something like $1.98 billion, or close to $2 billion.

The program, as we noted earlier, has had silent but bipartisan support; it was created by the Bush II administration without any congressional authorization, was subsequently expanded by the Obama administration, and has been tolerated by the Trump administration....

So the government is giving almost $2 billion in tax breaks to American employers if they hire alien — not resident workers.