DHS Offering Employers Cash If They Hire Alien College Grads Over Citizens

Good news, recent alien college graduate! Thanks to President Obama's executive actions and an incentive program launched by the Department of Homeland Security, employers are much more likely to hire you before they would a native college grad. It falls under the department's Optional Practical Training program, which currently gives recent alien graduates a one-year work permit and employers a cash bonus. The new rule not only adds a generous extension, it will also offer a bigger cash payout to employers who hire them.

As the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) notes, an illegal alien who majored in any of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields will get an additional 17 months of permitted work, expanding their initial year guarantee to over two years. DHS has also upped the incentive for U.S. employers to hire non-citizens by offering them an increase from $10,000 to at least $12,000 to hire an alien STEM graduate.

CIS' David North writes:

I searched the proposed rule that appears in today's Federal Register for references to payroll taxes (FICA, the Federal Insurance Contributions Act) and found none. I guess DHS does not want us to know about the generous tax break that both employers and aliens get from this program. I find it intellectually dishonest not to mention this tax break in a long, extremely detailed document on this subject.

All of this leads North to the most plausible conclusion: this is no "training" program as DHS designates, but "just one more foreign worker program that has nothing to do with students" and one that favors "aliens rather than citizens."