The Trump administration issued a final rule in July that gives it discretion to cut short the course of study of most international students at US universities. It will likely use this new power to block many of them from staying to work after they graduate and produce mounting delays for routine extensions needed to complete doctorates, residencies, and post-docs.
Disrupting international students, scholars, and researchers will ultimately deter them from coming in the first place, as my coauthors and I documented by surveying 1,039 of them in 2025. That would deepen the US trade deficit, because providing higher education to foreigners is an export, constituting about 5 percent of all US services exports. But far beyond that, the move will harm all Americans by slashing the supply of high-skill workers, impairing US innovation and productivity for a generation.
The new rule has overturned America's half-century-old policy of issuing student visas that are valid until the student finishes their course of study ("duration of status"), including a short employment experience after graduation directly related to their classwork. It restricts international students' visa status to a maximum of four years, or less if their classwork ends in fewer than four years. After that, students are forced to petition for additional time.
The rule is final and will go into effect in September. The US Congress could still stop it, invoking its authority under the Congressional Review Act to reverse rules that adversely affect the economy. Courts may also step in, given that the law obligates the administration to carefully weigh the economic fallout, and it failed to do that.
Americans should be alarmed at this final rule's likely impact. It would drastically restrict high-skill foreign talent in the vital science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields that are at the heart of innovation and productivity growth in the US economy. US-trained, high-skill foreign STEM workers who remain here after graduation patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States. They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates. The accelerating exclusion of international students from the US workforce will make the US economy less productive and Americans in general poorer.
My coauthors and I estimate the overall cost in an analysis commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. A sustained loss of one-third of the annual inflow of international students into the US economy, which is a conservative estimate, costs the United States roughly $200 billion to $400 billion per year—roughly 0.7 to 1.3 percent of GDP, a lost output equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina. This loss comes from the products that will never be invented, the manufacturing processes that will never be developed, the startup firms that will never be founded, the innovations that will never materialize, and entire industries that will never emerge.
The Stated Motive Doesn't Hold Water and Suggests Another
What is the point of this initiative? The administration's narrative is contrived and unconvincing.
The new rule presents itself as necessary to fight "fraud and abuse" by terrorists and others, ominously citing "the events of 9/11." That is a slim reason for a vast student visa lockdown a quarter-century later. Only one of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 was even on a student visa, the 9/11 Commission determined. The other 18 were on unrelated business or tourist visas.
The policy then cites 11 anonymous and thus unverifiable anecdotes of international students since 2008 who allegedly abused student visas to stay for decades. But 7.1 million student visas were issued over the same period. Such minuscule fraud justifies cracking down on the handful of fraudsters, not drastically curtailing visas for millions of others. The administration has already suspended or barred almost all student visas for 39 countries, claiming concerns about fraud and security. The government already has (since 9/11) a sophisticated system to track and monitor everyone in the country on student visas, enabling it to immediately detect anyone "staying for decades" or any fraudsters in real time.
The rule also vaguely refers to "10,000 cases of potential fraud" in Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows some international students to work in the United States in jobs related to their study. But the only evidence it cites, remarkably, is a link to a Politico article quoting a Department of Homeland Security official as asserting that such fraud exists. Potential fraud is not fraud, assertions are not evidence, and Politico posts are not agency investigations of fact.
So, setting aside these thin pretexts, what is the real reason? A more likely reason is that the administration hopes to block international students from staying as part of an across-the-board policy of excluding lawful immigrants. In fact, the administration has explicitly and repeatedly said it will use this authority for that purpose.
How the New Discretion Empowers Blocking Immigration
The laws encouraging student visas as a benefit beyond classwork have been on the books for decades. Congress designed student visas to combine studying in the United States and working in the United States, because of the known benefits of learning on the job as well as in the classroom. Student visas, known as F-class visas, have legally and explicitly allowed a year or more of paid work in the student's field as "practical training" since 1947. Congress has explicitly endorsed paid work on student visas several times, such as in 1961 when it exempted international students from certain taxes that only workers pay.
Working legally on student visas was formalized in its modern scheme under the OPT program by President George H. W. Bush 34 years ago. Republican and Democratic presidents later extended OPT to three years for students with degrees in STEM fields, reflecting a bipartisan consensus on the role of OPT in a crucial supply of talent to the US economy.
These Republicans and Democrats understood that international students enhance America's reputation internationally and that they are also a taproot of the high-skill STEM workforce the modern economy depends on. OPT is their principal channel to remain in the country. One-third of all STEM workers with a PhD in America came here as international students, then stayed. And 64 percent of all international STEM students at US universities work on OPT at the tail end of their student visa. This is their chief route for insertion into the US workforce: 33 percent of all international STEM grads from US universities find an employer to sponsor a work visa for them after working on OPT, while just 14 percent find one without OPT. OPT is therefore like an extended job interview, without which most employers are unwilling to bear the considerable risk and expense of sponsorship.
The new rule thus gives administration officials discretion to decimate the largest single channel of high-skill immigration to the United States. Because their initial visa status is now pre-set to terminate at the end of their degree, all international students will need to petition US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for an extension of their student visa status if they would like to complete their course of study by working on OPT. If USCIS officials simply don't hold the opinion that student visas should be used for that purpose, the new rule empowers them to block any or all such petitions, with sweeping discretion and no meaningful avenue of appeal.
The Administration Has Been Crystal Clear about Its Plans
This concern is not hypothetical. The officials who now have power to block access to OPT for any or essentially all international students have repeatedly and explicitly stated that they will do this.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow has claimed: "The INA [1952 Immigration and Nationality Act] is unambiguous. Student visas are for study—not for work after graduation." In his Senate confirmation hearing, Edlow promised to "remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school," which he has reiterated since. Edlow's boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, states that the explicit purpose of the new visa-duration policy is to ensure "that foreign students remain focused on their primary purpose: completing their studies and returning home." Immigration policy architect Stephen Miller's America First Legal, too, has insisted that OPT has no legal basis.
These claims are untrue. They have been repeated endlessly by activists seeking to have courts declare OPT illegal, for decades. All of these claims that OPT has no basis in law have been explicitly rejected in federal court, which the Supreme Court declined to revisit.
Now Edlow disinters the assertion that "there is no statutory basis for OPT," but history demonstrates that he is wrong. In fact Congress has voted across parties and across generations to repeatedly reaffirm that student visas allow paid work. The 1950 Senate Report that formed the basis for the 1952 INA explicitly stated that people on student visas could legally work, including "after completion" of their degrees. Congress discussed the report at length and enacted the INA fully aware of that agency interpretation.
Congress then spent several decades repeatedly confirming that the purpose of student visas in the INA includes paid work. In 1961, Congress voted to specify the tax treatment of labor “which is performed to carry out the purpose” of F-class student visas, and in 1984 it again legislated the tax treatment of F-visa students’ income from work. That would be nonsense if Congress understood the “purpose” of those visas to exclude paid work. In 1990, Congress—again recognizing that international students were entitled under the 1952 law to work before and after graduation to gain experience related to their degree—enacted a Section 221 pilot program to expand that entitlement by allowing off-campus employment unrelated to the student’s field of study. It voted to extend that program four years later.
If Congress felt that generations of agency guidance had misinterpreted its "purpose” in creating F-class visas, these actions have no plausible explanation. Instead it left untouched the 1947 rule explicitly allowing postgraduation work. Over the last 10 years, bills to abolish OPT have been introduced in Congress again and again and again and again. Neither chamber passed or even voted on any of them.
To be sure, no statute has ever referenced "Optional Practical Training." What Congress did instead was tax it, regulate it, and repeatedly decline explicit attempts to abolish it, for generations. Congress has clearly and obviously designed student visas to combine coursework and paid practical training since Elvis Presley was a schoolboy.
But these generations of unmistakable statements from Congress leave current visa regulators unwavering in their personal opinions. "I am right," says Edlow. These are precisely the officials who, under the new policy, have total discretion over whether any international student can use their student visa for post-degree-completion work. There is little ambiguity in their promises. Barring a sudden change of heart, they will be stopped by either Congress or the courts, or they will use their new discretion to sharply curtail the largest single channel by which high-skill foreign STEM talent enters the US workforce.
The US Congress can stop this, now. There is active legislation to defend OPT from being gutted. Congress can also block the new "duration of status" policy simply due to its large effects on the US economy, under the Congressional Review Act. Courts may also strike down the new policy because it failed to seriously consider and estimate the enormous economic harm it could bring.
Data Disclosure
This publication does not include a replication package.
