California college graduates have been struggling to take their next steps into the career world. According to one congressman, the issue is not a lack of jobs, but a prioritization of foreign workers.
For years, the Golden State’s Bay Area has been a haven for jobs within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
But Republican Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt told the Daily Signal that companies and universities have been passing up American workers and instead relying on temporary employment tied to international students’ major area of study—known as Optional Practical Training (OPT).
“We went from displacing blue-collar workers with sending jobs overseas, and then illegal immigrants suppressing wages and taking other jobs,” Schmitt said. “Then you also have white-collar job issue[s] with H-1B visa[s], which we tried to highlight, but also displacing recent grads and American students through these programs like OPT.”
Schmitt has long called for the end of OPT. On Friday, he released data that showed California has 46,547 OPT workers with 19,285 employers.
While the concept of the OPT program was introduced in the late 1940s, it wasn’t until 1992 that the program modernized and rolled out to California. Due to most of its early participants being from STEM and other technical fields, California quickly became a top destination for OPT.
The program allows international college students who are in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa to work in the United States for a short time following graduation. Per the requirement, the job should be directly related to their major, giving them temporary legal work permission without needing a full work visa like an H-1B.
The program quickly became popular with employers, as F-1 visa holders on OPT are exempt from Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes, saving companies the full 7.65% employer payroll tax that they must pay for U.S. workers.
“You’ve just seen thousands of American workers whose only crime was that they happen to be, I guess, more expensive than their foreign replacements that came over to do the same job. And they’re using the H-1B program,” Schmitt said.
“They’re also using OPT as a way to the backdoor. It’s sort of a backdoor jobs program for foreign nationals at the expense of American workers and recent graduates struggling to find work,” he added.
In 2012, 54 members from education, industry, and policy fields were gathered to create the California STEM Task Force. By the following year, the state adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which became a core part of the push for California students to pursue STEM.
In 2014, the task force released a report called “INNOVATE: A Blueprint for STEM Education,” laying out seven strategic recommendations that guided implementation throughout the state. Because of this collective push, statewide STEM bachelor’s degrees jumped 55% between 2010-2017, with non-STEM degrees growing only 17%, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Within the California State University system alone, STEM majors now make up roughly 30% of undergraduate students, and STEM degrees conferred rose by more than 3,300 per year between 2016-17 and 2022-23, data from the state universities show.
The push from the state also included messaging to students that pursuing STEM would lead to abundant career opportunities and financial security in fast-growing industries.
Although the state drove a successful campaign for STEM, recent data shows that graduates in the major are now having a difficult time finding a job after graduation.
“What you’re seeing is OPT being used by universities as kind of this visa mill, because they get the students to pay full tuition,” Schmitt said. “The school benefits from it from that regard, and then employers get more compliant, cheaper labor because they’re dependent on that visa for their employment.”
“And they don’t have to pay taxes for one-to-three years on that OPT employee, whereas they do have to pay taxes for American workers.”
He explained this creates a “perverse incentive structure” to hire foreign labor instead of recent American graduates, and younger workers suffer.
“If you want to really get at what Gen Z and others are frustrated with right now, they want to make sure they have opportunities. They take on a debt load to get the degree, and then they’re displaced by a foreign student or foreign worker for something that they’re eminently qualified for,” Schmitt added.
National data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that, overall, recent college graduates in all majors have an estimated 5.6% unemployment rate since late 2025.
Computer engineering is one of the highest among struggling majors, with roughly 7.5% to 7.8% of graduates unable to find a job. Additionally, computer science majors are around 6.1% to 7%, and physics majors are 6.6% to 7.8%.
In comparison, surveys from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego show that an estimated 25% to 30% of recent respondents are still job-hunting or pivoting to further education post-graduation.
“This is really being used to undermine the wages and opportunities of Americans. I think that’s the kind of abuse that we want to highlight. And I think that’s why we’re pushing for reform because the displacement of blue collar workers has been well-documented,” Schmitt said.
Republicans have introduced bills in both the House and Senate that would either abolish the program or end the FICA payroll-tax exemption for OPT workers.
In November, Schmitt sent a letter to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, calling out the OPT program and its harms to American graduates.
Although DHS later committed to re-evaluate the entire OPT and STEM OPT program, there was a counter bipartisan bill introduced in March 2026.
Democratic Reps. Sam Liccardo of California and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, along with Republican California Rep. Jay Obernolte, introduced the bill to codify OPT into law so it can’t be ended by regulation alone.
When asked about the pushback received regarding the possibility of eliminating the OPT program, Schmitt called out the Democratic Party’s push of open borders under the Biden administration.
He additionally noted that he believes President Donald Trump has taken action, pointing to an 87% decline in petitions for workers from outside the U.S. and the positive movement on H-1B visas.
“They’ve been captured by the radical Left. They don’t believe that we can decide how many people we let in and who has to leave. So that creates sort of a fundamental disconnect,” Schmitt said. “But look, I think both parties have to look in the mirror as it relates to legal immigration and decide who are we going to prioritize? American workers or cheaper foreign labor?”
