21 House Republications signed their names to THIS letter addressed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf imploring the preservation of a jobs program that makes it cheaper for a STEM employer to hire an international student and/ or alumni than an American one.
Oh, those aren't quite the words House Republicans used but that's how the program works.
In their May 2020 blog post the Center for Immigration Studies explains the OPT-Optical Practical Training program and why it should be downsized(emphasis mine):
Now is the perfect time to downsize — sharply — the Optional Practical Training program.
This is the program that rewards employers for hiring foreign college grads with an 8 percent discount, a discount the employer could not get if he hired an American college grad. OPT runs for one year for all foreign grads of all American institutions (of whatever level of merit) and an additional two years for a large portion of the alien alumni who have a degree in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM).See how that works?
The discounts are made available by eliminating the usual payroll taxes, which support America's embattled Social Security, Medicare, and Federal-State Unemployment Insurance trust Funds — so America's aging, disabled, sick, and unemployed are forced to subsidize (usually for-profit) employers who prefer alien workers to American ones. That is a truly bizarre arrangement, but one rarely reported by the media.The STEM employer does not deduct payroll taxes from the paycheck of the foreign college student/ graduate.
BTW, the program was not the result of enabling legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by a United States President. It was made up by former President George W. Bush, expanded under President Obama and still in existence under the Trump administration.
The upside of this odd program is that Congress never had anything to do with it; it was created out of whole cloth by the Bush administration, expanded by the Obama administration, and protected, so far, by the Trump administration. It can be wiped out, or changed, with a stroke of the pen.
The names of the 21 House Republicans are:
Rep. Steve Stivers (OH-15)
Rep. Bill Flores (TX-17)
Rep. Peter King (NY-2)
Rep. Rodney Davis (IL-13)
Rep. Rob Woodall (GA-7)
Rep. John Katko (NY-24)
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (TN-3)
Rep. Fred Upton (MI-6)
Rep. Pete Olson (TX-22)
Rep. Ann Wagner (MO-2)
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-1)
Rep. Joe Wilson (SC-2)
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-3)
Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (VA-9)
Rep. John Shimkus (IL-15)
Rep. David Schweikert (AZ-6)
Rep. Tom Reed (NY-23)
Rep. Don Bacon (NE-2)
Rep. Dan Newhouse (WA-4)
Rep. Trent Kelly (MS-1)
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-5)
These are the House Republicans undermining the future of American college students who need to earn a living in order to not only repay their college loans but go on to marry and raise a family. They are angry at you for voting for an America First agenda and are pulling out all the stops to sure your college kids are mired in student debt they can't repay.
