Optional Practical Training is the program that lets an international student who has just finished a degree in America actually work in America for a while, which is, for a lot of students, rather the point of the degree. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed making that arrangement a lot more expensive: a $70,000 fee that schools would pay to enable each international student to work on OPT, plus an additional $30,000 fee for any subsequent OPT periods, as Business Insider reported. Business Insider put the proposal to two immigration lawyers, Hector Chichoni of Greenspoon Marder and Aaron Blumberg of Fragomen, to game out who ends up holding the bill.
An ICE spokesperson told Business Insider the proposal is designed to strengthen oversight of the program and address concerns about fraud and abuse. Take that rationale seriously for a second. A fee is an odd fraud-detection instrument. Fraud detection involves investigators; a fee involves a check. What a $70,000 price tag does detect, with perfect accuracy, is who can pay $70,000. If the goal is to shrink the program, pricing it like a speedboat will certainly do that.
Who actually Pays the $70,000
Nominally, the university. Chichoni points out this lands on schools at a moment when many are already under financial pressure. But here is the lovely bit of drafting: the proposed rule states that schools “may pass the financial obligation of this proposed fee onto F-1 nonimmigrant students, all students, or employers.” So the invoice is addressed to the university but payable by essentially anyone in the building — the international student who wants the job, the American student whose tuition subsidizes the office, or the employer who wants to hire the graduate. The fee is a hot potato dressed as a regulation.
Blumberg argues that if the cost reaches the students, OPT becomes financially inaccessible for many of them, “limiting opportunities for international students to gain valuable U.S. work experience.” And then the ripple goes outward: international students pay tuition that keeps American colleges running, so if the fee discourages enrollment, the consequences arrive as higher tuition, fewer academic programs and thinner campus resources for everyone, domestic students included. Employers feel it too, since “OPT has long been an important bridge between U.S. higher education and the American workforce.”
A bit of arithmetic shows what “inaccessible” means in practice. A graduate who works an initial OPT period and then a subsequent one — the structure under which STEM extensions typically fall — could carry $100,000 in regulatory fees attached to their own labor before anyone has discussed their salary. Imagine you run a regional public university with a modest international program: you are not absorbing that out of the endowment. You are handing it down, or you are quietly no longer enabling OPT, which amounts to the same shrinkage with extra steps.
File Early
Both lawyers stress that this is a proposed rule, not a finished law, and that panic is not a filing strategy. Blumberg’s advice to current international students is to keep pursuing their educational and professional plans, stay informed and work closely with their university’s international student office. Chichoni’s is blunter: students currently eligible for OPT or STEM extensions should not delay their filings, “to ensure the applications are grandfathered in before any final regulatory shifts.” When two lawyers independently tell you the safe move is to get your paperwork in before the rule lands, the expected direction of travel is not a mystery.
Context matters here. The OPT fee is one move in a 12-month campaign to reshape legal immigration: changes to the H-1B process — the visa whose holders’ lives Business Insider has chronicled in its H-1B Fallout series, and whose basic bargain we have written about before — plus new limits on how long F-1 students are initially admitted to stay. And the OPT proposal landed one day before the administration suspended tech companies, including Microsoft, from the program used to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, a step we covered here. Bridge, visa, green card: each segment of the same road now has a toll booth going up.
There is a coherent theory of governing in which you announce that a program is rife with fraud and then, instead of catching any fraudsters, charge the honest participants $70,000 a head. It is not a theory of fraud enforcement. It is a theory of demand destruction, and the students are not the ones being fooled about which is which.