News on the economy is all over the place, but a solid thread runs through it: many recent American college graduates can’t find jobs. Not only are employers not hiring, they’re laying off left and right. Amazon and United Parcel Service are each cutting more than 14,000 jobs, and the Wall Street Journal says tens of thousands of white-collar jobs are being cut at other companies.
Yet at the same time, the U.S. immigration system permits thousands of foreign college graduates to enter the job market in direct competition with Americans. Companies employing them don’t have to pay the same payroll taxes as they do when hiring American citizens and permanent residents. This gives foreign students an unfair advantage over American graduates.
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Given the brutal job market, the underlying premise for OPT no longer applies. Why allow masses of temporary foreign students to remain in the U.S. and enter the work force right out of college when your own graduates can’t get jobs? The argument for eliminating this program has never been stronger. As Lora Ries argues, we need to “allow American students and American workers a fair shake at applying for jobs, being interviewed for jobs, being hired for jobs, and being retained at their jobs.”
Unemployment of college graduates aged 23-27 is a few percentage points higher than the national average of 4%. The long-term unemployment rate (more than 6 months out of work) in the country for that age group is 26%, the highest in three years. And of those college graduates who are employed, over half are working in jobs that don’t require a degree.
It’s fair to argue that many recent graduates got degrees that are patently useless in a tight market. Anything ending in “studies” comes to mind, or mass-produced degrees from diploma mills whose quality is not respected by employers. But graduates with the vaunted Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math degrees are faring badly, too. Graduate unemployment for computer engineering graduates was 7.5%, and for physics it was 7.8%.
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Labor-saving robots, now supercharged with AI, are a threat to traditional pathways into the labor market for people. Amazon has over a million of them doing warehouse and shipping work formerly done by people.
We don’t know how the deployment of AI is going to play out. Maybe it will exponentially increase productivity, and we’ll end up in a cashless, Star Trek world where no one works unless they want to. Maybe the machines will take over and wipe us out, as in the Terminator movies. Or maybe AI will be just one more leap forward, like the printing press, electricity, or the internet, that requires a massive adjustment of our labor force and economy.
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Congress should end the OPT program while we figure out how to employ, or retrain, the rising graduate workforce of American citizens. Joseph Edlow, head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he wants to “remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school.” That’s a good start.
* Original Article:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-college-lie-how-washingtons-visa-loopholes-hand-good-jobs-to-foreign-workers
