When foreigners want to stay, “but struggle to stay.”  How H-1B, J1, OPT find creative ways to get back in the U.S.

You are in the U.S. You are a Foreigner. You really, really want stay here and get a well paying corporate job in the U.S. But it’s very difficult to do it, main reason being that there are already Million plus other Foreigners who did it last year,  this year, and you are one of many who tries to squeeze in as well!  So,  what do you do?  You “find creative ways to get yourself back in the U.S.’ 


2018 USCIS Statistical Annual Report Final (PDF) from https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies

H-1B, L1,  OPT,  J1, and H4EAD all have to file form II-765 Employment Authorization Document (EAD), commonly known as a work permit. As you can see,  every year we have close to 2 million permits issued.  Foreigners who came here in previous years never leave, they keep extending their visas and eventually try to get American citizenship.

Here is the story of one Foreign Graduate that has opened the “Edtech company ‘Interstride'”  – a “Company that Helps Foreign MBA Students Stay & Thrive In The U.S.” published by Yahoo Finance on September 22, 2020.

‘Look, there’s definitely a void in the market in terms of international students and how they are serviced by higher-education institutions. Regardless of where you do your MBA, whether you graduated from Berkeley or from Harvard or Stanford, if you’re international, you’re in the same boat. If you don’t receive H-1B, you are basically out of luck. And that visa has a 25,000 quota for every year and it’s always over-subscribed. So you have to find creative ways to get yourself back in the U.S.’

“This Company Helps Foreign MBA Students Stay & Thrive In The U.S.” by Marc Ethier



So, what this company does, it scrapes all Corporate entry level jobs from Corporations that are looking to employ new graduates and hangs these jobs to Foreign Graduates,  leaving American Graduates behind.  Corporations LOVE Foreign Graduates.   By hiring Foreign OPT students any American Corporation immediately starts saving 15% on any Foreign Graduate vs American Graduate.  It’s all in the Law!  Money saved is money earned!



According to the article business is doing very good,  so expanding business is obviously in their plans.  But the key to expanding their business is to bring in more students.   And this is exactly what they are doing: They are

“working with universities to increase their international student enrollment and retention rates, by bolstering often-beleaguered career services and international student offices.”

“This Company Helps Foreign MBA Students Stay & Thrive In The U.S.” by Marc Ethier

Marketplace for derailing Americans from Corporate jobs and stable incomes: “we provide immigration advice.  We give them insight on employers that hire international”

“The biggest bottleneck today is from a career standpoint.
“On the front end, whether it’s top MBA program or any other program, they over-promise international students about the great opportunities students will have once they graduate from XYZ University. Once a student is here in the U.S. and now they’re looking for jobs, career services are often clueless on how to assist these students. Most career services administrators are not immigration experts, and then international student services that provide immigration advice or OPT and CPT and H1B information, they are not career experts. There’s a huge gap there because students don’t know who to contact and reach out to. That’s where we build the bridge: we provide immigration advice. We give them insight on employers that hire international, along with contacts that they can reach out to for job opportunities. And now we’re working with alumni services to bring alumni to the portal as well, and we’re starting a marketplace where we can connect international students to immigration lawyers.”

“This Company Helps Foreign MBA Students Stay & Thrive In The U.S.” by Marc Ethier

H-1B Authorized to Work Population Estimate Report (PDF) USCIS report from https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies

And this is how Foreign Graduates justify their entitlement for the American jobs:

“So when someone is paying 200-plus-thousand dollars — because, as you know, international students don’t really get scholarships or financial aid, and most of these people are footing full tuition — the service needs to be justified. The ROI needs to be there on the education. If these students have to go back to their home country and work for a job in rupees, it just doesn’t justify that expenditure.”

“This Company Helps Foreign MBA Students Stay & Thrive In The U.S.” by Marc Ethier

Employers won’t even grant interviews — much less job offers — to many 2020 graduates. Yet they’re still hiring foreign workers in droves.

But what about American graduates, who also just finished the same Universities, graduated in the same majors, as their foreign classmates,  and are looking for stable,  well paid middle-class American jobs as well?  What happens to them?



Even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused record layoffs and froze hiring at many businesses, American college graduates struggled to find decent jobs. More than four in 10 experienced “underemployment” — taking jobs that don’t require a college degree — after graduation, according to a 2018 report from consultancy Burning Glass Technologies. Think of the classic example of graduates who end up working near-minimum wage jobs as baristas or waiters.

Fifty-one percent of biological and biomedical science degree holders, 40% of physical science majors and 39% of math and statistics majors face underemployment, according to that same report. About half of all STEM graduates don’t take jobs in their fields.

COVID-19 merely exacerbated this problem. And the OPT program makes recent American graduates’ job search even harder.

OPT lets employers circumvent immigration caps and hire foreigners in unlimited numbers — padding their bottom lines and displacing American workers in the process. As the American Worker Coalition has pointed out, employers don’t have to pay Medicare and Social Security contributions for OPT employees, which amounts to a 15.3% tax incentive per foreign employee who’s hired in place of an American. No wonder the OPT program grew 400% between 2008 and 2016.

This perverse tax incentive robbed Social Security, Medicare and f8ederal unemployment funds of $2.4 billion in fiscal 2017 alone.

Suspend OPT program so American college grads can find jobs, by Nick Reidy

Students with an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) who were employed by calendar year. DOL 2020 Annual Report to Congress from https://www.dhs.gov/topic/prior-annual-reports

So, maybe life of the foreign graduates is rough in America,  live of the American Graduates is even more grim.  They have their jobs,  their careers,  their livelihoods and dreams given away to the Foreigners in their own country and very little is done to stop it.  


Hired-in global talent is not necessarily!  America has plenty of talent hungry for jobs!

America Graduates plenty of talent!

“The U.S. produces 1.9m bachelors graduates a year, plus hundreds of thousands of Masters graduates, plus PhDs: “It seems implausible Corporations can’t find workers among the 1.9m.” 

“U.S. banks and hedge funds have no need of H1B Visa talent for elite roles” by Sarah Butcher