"OPT" Program Fraud? You Betcha!!

Let's start with the basics.

 ...The OPT program, and its pre-graduation twin, the Curricular Practical Training Program, allow a wide swath of graduates with technology-related degrees to work for up to five years — usually without paying Social Security taxes, and often in software sweatshops. That long work period gives many white-collar migrants time to train, build resumes, and file to enter the annual H-1B program, which provides them with an on-ramp to green cards and citizenship.

The resulting workforce of more than one million subservient and low-wage CPT, OPT, and H-1B workers is used by foreign-managed companies to win low-cost subcontracts from a wide variety of U.S. companies. That imported cheap competition has crippled many U.S. companies, and shoved millions of American graduates out ot of jobs, careers, and middle-class prosperity....In 2024, the program issued more than 400,000 work permits to foreign students and graduates at U.S colleges — even though Congress never approved or even debated the corporate giveaway created by President George W. Bush.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

 ...Markwayne Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security is exposing fraud throughout the huge Optional Practical Training (OPT) program that feeds many white-collar migrants into the careers sought by U.S. graduates.

“We have identified over 10,000 foreign students who claim to be working for highly suspect employers, and that’s just among the top 25 OPT employers,” said Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which oversees the OPT program.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he added, without taking questions at a press conference on Tuesday morning....

"Highly suspect employers" includes a helluvalot of offshore-based sweatshop contractors.

Maybe ICE will release a list of them.  Odds are that they contract with the State of Wisconsin.