Senator Eric Schmitt Urges Homeland Security to Review Optional Practical Training Rules

(UNITED STATES) – U.S. lawmakers pressed opposite agendas on the Optional Practical Training program this month, with Senator Eric Schmitt urging the Department of Homeland Security to end or overhaul it while a bipartisan House group moved to write it into law.

The split has turned a long-running immigration and labor dispute into a live policy fight over whether foreign students should keep access to post-graduation work authorization. One side describes OPT as a back door for cheaper labor. The other argues it helps keep U.S.-educated talent in the country after graduation.

Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem backing an overhaul or termination of OPT. He called it “one of the most abused programs in the entire U.S. immigration system.”

Schmitt also argued that the program serves as a “cheap-labor pipeline for big business” that “boxes young Americans out of the workforce, discriminates against American workers in favor of foreign labor, and suppresses wages and job opportunities for U.S. graduates.”

His intervention came as House lawmakers advanced the opposite approach. Representatives Sam Liccardo of California, Jay Obernolte of California, and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois introduced the Keep Innovators in America Act on March 19 to codify OPT into law.

That bill would give a statutory footing to a program that currently allows international students to work in the United States for 12 months after graduation. STEM graduates can receive an additional 24-month extension.

Those dueling moves captured the divide now surrounding Optional Practical Training. Some Republican lawmakers want the government to shut it down entirely. Other lawmakers, including sponsors of the March 19 bill, want to shield it from administrative or legal reversal by writing it directly into federal law.

Liccardo framed the dispute in competitive terms. “We have a choice: educate the best and brightest students in the US to help America succeed, or send them home to China, India and other rivals to launch companies to compete against us,” he said.

The immediate political case against OPT centers on jobs and wages. Schmitt’s letter cast the program as harmful to recent U.S. graduates, and his language aligned with a broader argument from restrictionist groups that employers use foreign student work authorization to lower labor costs.

The Center for Immigration Studies has backed terminating OPT. The group pointed to Joseph Edlow, President Trump’s nominee to lead U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who said he wanted to “remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school.”

Congressional opponents of the program have also moved beyond letters and public criticism. H.R. 2315, introduced in the House by an Arizona Republican with eight Republican co-sponsors, seeks to eliminate OPT entirely.

That places the program in a direct legislative squeeze. In one chamber, lawmakers have proposed wiping it out. In the other effort, a bipartisan coalition has proposed preserving it with a clear legal basis and what supporters describe as long-term certainty.

The economic arguments are also sharply different. Supporters of OPT say ending the program would not simply affect foreign graduates, but would ripple through universities, employers and local economies that depend on international student spending and skilled labor.

Advocates estimate that eliminating OPT could cause annual losses of $220 billion to $440 billion within the next 10 years. That figure is part of the case for keeping the program in place, though it remains an estimate advanced by supporters rather than a government forecast tied to pending legislation.

Another number sits at the center of the debate. International students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2024-2025 academic year.

Supporters of the Keep Innovators in America Act use figures like that to argue that the country benefits twice from foreign students, first when universities enroll them and again when employers can hire some of them after graduation. In that view, OPT helps convert an education pipeline into a domestic work pipeline instead of sending trained graduates abroad.

Opponents reach a different conclusion from the same structure. They see a system that gives employers access to foreign labor after U.S. graduation and say the result is downward pressure on wages and fewer openings for American workers entering the job market.

The scope of the current program is part of why it draws such attention. Standard OPT grants 12 months of post-graduation work permission, while graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields can add another 24 months. That longer runway has made the STEM extension a focal point in the fight, because it extends foreign student employment well beyond the classroom period.

Critics tied to the restrictionist side have increasingly folded OPT into a larger campaign against employment authorization for F-1 students. Edlow’s statement about removing work authorization beyond the time students are in school reflects that broader push, one aimed not merely at revising the program’s rules but at narrowing the concept of student status itself.

Backers of codification are trying to head off that outcome before an administration or a court can move first. By putting OPT into statute, they would reduce the risk that the program’s future turns on executive branch policy changes or shifting interpretations inside the Department of Homeland Security.

The timing matters for universities and employers that have treated OPT as a stable part of the U.S. higher education system. Any effort to terminate it would reach beyond immigration agencies and into college recruitment, graduate hiring and the way foreign students assess whether a U.S. degree leads to a period of legal work experience.

That helps explain why the debate is running on two tracks at once. Republicans hostile to the program have paired criticism with a bill and with public support from groups that want student employment authorization curtailed. Lawmakers trying to preserve it have answered with legislation of their own and with an argument rooted in competition for global talent.

Schmitt’s language made the labor case in stark terms, while Liccardo’s quote made the talent-retention case just as directly. Between those positions sits a policy that has become a test of how Washington defines the value of international students after they leave the classroom.

Congress and the Department of Homeland Security now face a clear choice on Optional Practical Training: preserve a post-study work program that supporters say helps the United States keep skilled graduates, or dismantle a system that critics call a “cheap-labor pipeline for big business.”