Small Businesses Get $2 Billion If They Hire Alien Grads Instead Of American Grads

The Federal government is still incentivizing businesses to favor immigrants over Americans, to the tune of $2 billion in subsidies across the country, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

They do this via the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This program by the Federal government provides money to businesses that discriminate against American citizens in favor of immigrant ones.

At this point, this is just par for the course.

According to the CIS, this program was used to scrape $2 billion from the Federal tax pool to give to businesses that hire 240,000 alien college graduates in favor of American graduates. This is done by giving any business that hires a foreign student that has graduated from a US post-secondary institution an 8.25% tax break.







The CIS explains how this number was calculated:

The subsidies to hire the foreign alumni are extracted from the Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance Program trust funds and were estimated to be in the area of $1.155 billion in that article. It is now clear that in FY 2017 the total subsidies came to something like $1.98 billion, or close to $2 billion.

They then go on to note the political support this program has silently received over the past decade:

The program, as we noted earlier, has had silent but bipartisan support; it was created by the Bush II administration without any congressional authorization, was subsequently expanded by the Obama administration, and has been tolerated by the Trump administration.

The employers benefiting from the subsidies directly, and universities benefiting indirectly, know all about the program, which is all but unknown to the older Americans subsidizing it, and is similarly unknown to the young U.S. college grads who are hurt by it. Given this twisted political dynamic, inertia, and the total silence of the media on this point, the program persists and grows each year.

Considering this is the kind of thing President Trump railed against during his 2016 election run, I’m sure that if this was directly brought to his attention the state department may move to cut this arbitrary discriminatory funding based on nothing other than citizenship.

This is also just one of many examples of how immigration hurts American workers and why solutions such as the RAISE Act (meant to curb both legal and illegal immigration) should be revisited as pushed forward as soon as possible.