Back in 2011 I wrote in The Atlantic that “The No-Brainer Issue of the Year” was “Let High-Skill Immigrants Stay”:
We should create a straightforward route to permanent residency for foreign-born students who graduate with advance degrees from American universities, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We educate some of the best and brightest students in the world in our universities and then on graduation day we tell them, “Thanks for visiting. Now go home!” It’s hard to imagine a more short-sighted policy to reduce America’s capacity for innovation.
We never went as far as I advocated but through programs like Optional Practical Training (OPT) we did allow and encourage high-skilled workers to stay in the United States, greatly contributing to American entrepreneurship, startup creation (Stripe and SpaceX, for example, are just two unicorns started by people who first came to the US as foreign students), patenting and innovation and job growth more generally. Moreover, there appeared to be a strong bi-partisan consensus as both Barack Obama and Donald Trump have argued that we should “staple a green card to diplomas”. Indeed in 2024 Donald Trump said:
What I want to do, and what I will do, is—you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges, too.
And yet Joseph Edlow, President Trump’s appointee to lead the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said that he wants to kill the OPT program.
“What I want to see is…us to remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they’re in school.”
It’s remarkable how, in field after field, driven by petty grievance and the illusion of victimhood. the United States seems intent on undermining its own greatest strengths.
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