Washington (DC), USA (PTI): Nearly three lakh foreign students took up temporary employment in the US post-studies in 2024-25 even as the number of student visas is on a decline, according to a report, which advocated the scrapping of the Optional Practical Training program.
The report, authored by George Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Centre for Immigration Studies, said the number of US visas issued to Indian students has declined by 62 per cent in 2025 in comparison with the previous year, a move that would benefit American students.
According to the report, visas issued to students from China also saw a 34 per cent decline to 40,034 in 2025 when compared with 61,075 travel documents issued the previous year.
The US issued 22,149 student visas to Indian nationals in 2025 as against 58,694 in 2024.
In the 2024-25 academic year, as many as 3,63,019 students from India and 2,65,919 from China made up 53 per cent of all foreign students (1,177,766) at the post-secondary level, according to the annual census by the Institute of International Education (IIE).
"Of the more than one million foreign students in the US during the 2024/25 academic year, fully one-quarter (294,253) had already completed their degrees and were working in the US pursuant to 'Optional Practical Training' (OPT)," the report said, quoting the IIE census.
It said that of the total number of students working under the OPT programme in 2024-25, 49 per cent (143,740) were from India, followed by 21 per cent or 61,981 from China.
"I have advocated for the termination of OPT in order to protect the wages and employment opportunities of American students and workers; and 2) end the George W. Bush and Obama administrations' disgraceful use of the OPT program to subvert the will of Congress," Fishman said.
"But, short of that, reducing the OPT pipeline of foreign students from India and the PRC - who make up the majority of all OPT participants - will reduce the deleterious effects of OPT on American students and workers," Fishman said.
The CIS report uses the May-August period for comparison as a bulk of each year's F-1 visas are issued in this period in anticipation of the upcoming academic year.
In 2024, 77 per cent of all F-1 visas issued to Indian nationals and 76 per cent issued to Chinese nationals were issued during this period, according to the CIS report.
This report was published from a syndicated wire feed. Apart from the headline, the EdexLive Desk has not edited the copy.
