Suppose your firm needs an analyst with training in combat systems engineering, or in low-observable and stealth technology, or in undersea warfare. Do you think the U.S. government will pay your firm a bonus for hiring an alien, rather than a U.S. citizen, for the job?
How about a job in military applied sciences, strategic intelligence, or military information systems technology? Is there a financial plus for hiring an alien for these jobs?
The answer is yes.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will see to it that the employer of a recent alien college graduate with one of these high-security specialties will get a bonus of about $100 a week for hiring an alien into one of these positions rather than hiring a U.S. citizen with the same qualifications. (I am assuming a salary of about $63,000 a year.) I am not sure that this has happened, but DHS has made certain that it could be done.
I am not a super-patriot or a terrorism nut case, but I do think it odd that the government has created — openly, if you look at the right documents — a system for encouraging the employment of aliens in various military specialties, as well as in nuclear engineering.
How did DHS manage such a thing, and why did it do so?
As noted in an earlier blog, DHS has the power to define who is, or who is not, a foreign college student on an F-1 visa. The agency has used this power, in both the Bush and Obama administrations, to redefine a former foreign college student on an F-1 visa, as a current one, for up to 29 months after graduation, provided the F-1 has a degree in one of more than 400 occupations, some of which are noted above. This is done through the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which is administered by that agency.
Since by law neither F-1s nor their employers have to pay the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, employers of F-1 aliens get a substantial tax break as long as the alien stays in that status; the aliens' salaries are also not subject to payroll tax deductions.
That's how DHS manages this strange program, which is heavily tilted toward alien students rather than their U.S.-citizen peers with the same academic backgrounds; the citizens and their employers, of course, pay their full share of the Social Security and Medicare taxes.
The use of the OPT program to provide jobs to aliens rather than to citizens also has the unfortunate by-product of depriving these trust funds for the elderly of $737 million a year, as we spelled out in another recent CIS publication.
As to why these tax breaks are given to some employers of aliens, this is just another technique that the administration can and does use to expand legal migration to the United States while bypassing Congress.
The full list of these favored occupations includes a wide variety of mostly non-military fields, from animal science, biology, chemistry, dairy science, educational evaluation and research, food science, and geology through mathematics to zoology. If an F-1 graduate has a degree in one of these fields (and those students tend to concentrate in scientific and technological areas), then they can work in the United States for 29 months after graduation and their employers can get a 8.25 percent discount for hiring them rather than U.S. workers.
There are no numerical limits on OPT jobs and many are bridges to H-1B jobs, where there are some ceilings. The expansion of OPT in recent years has been seen by critics as a technique to bridge the gap between the alien's enrollment in college and his or her acceptance in the H-1B program, as we described in another blog.
DHS, egged on by big business, accepts the false notion that there is a shortage of Americans with skills in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) and that those "shortages" should be filled by aliens. With this mindset, DHS apparently casually adopted some existing listing of high-tech occupations, and did not notice that air science/airpower studies, and cyber/electronic operations and warfare, among other sensitive fields, were among the occupations included.