DHS proposes a $70,000 OPT fee for F-1 visa holders in the United States, calling the program a pipeline for cheap foreign labor into the workforce.
Page T26From§Eachthe early evening edition — 7 October 2026
DHS prices foreign students out of a 'cheap labor' pipeline, then cuts their grace period to zero.
As it ran on the front
On October 7, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $70,000 fee on the work authorization that lets foreign graduates take a job in this country after they finish school. The filing calls the program, known as OPT, a pipeline for cheap foreign labor. The fee is pitched as the toll that closes the pipeline.
Run the filing forward and it does something else. Weeks earlier, on September 10, the same department proposed a separate rule: any visa holder who loses or quits a job must leave the country immediately, with no 60-day grace period to find the next one. Pair the two filings and the ledger reads differently than the press release. A graduate who clears the $70,000 line now holds a work authorization with no cushion under it. Lose the job, any reason, and the clock is zero, not sixty. That is not a toll on cheap labor. That is the structure that makes labor cheap: a worker who cannot afford to lose the job does not negotiate the job.…
…(cont) Set the $70,000 figure beside the season it landed in. A separate dated filing, pulled from Britain's own accounting of student finances and published September 16, found 63 percent of students skipping meals, 9 percent using a food bank, more than one in four working two jobs, and nearly half considering dropping out, all over money. That survey is not about these visa holders; it is a different country's students on a different loan system. But it is the same season, the same ledger line, the same arithmetic: tuition up, aid flat, meals the thing that gives. Wherever you run that column, $70,000 does not read like a processing fee. It reads like several years of groceries, charged at the gate, to the applicants least able to walk away from the job once they're in it.
The gap has a shape. The graduate pays the $70,000 and loses the grace period that used to be the only leverage they had. The employer keeps a workforce that cannot afford to quit and cannot afford to be fired. The department gets a filing that prices a labor pipeline while tightening the valve that makes the labor in it cheap. Hon, that is not a contradiction in the filing. That is the filing working as drafted.
“They call it a fee on cheap labor and then yank the only thing that ever let a worker say no to a bad boss — the 60 days to find another job. That's not a toll, that's a leash, and the length just got set to zero. A kid who can't afford to get fired isn't expensive labor, he's the cheapest labor there is.”
“Look, seventy thousand dollars weeds out the programs that were never about education, it's a market signal, it protects American jobs — did I say protects? I meant it's revenue-neutral, it's a — the grace period thing is totally unrelated, separate rulemaking, separate docket, nothing to see in the sequencing, none.”
The receipts
· Students skipping meals and working multiple jobs to meet living costs from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Immigrants with work visas will have to immediately leave country if they lose job under new Trump DHS rule from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.