According to NBC Bay Area, a Silicon Vally CEO Kelly Huang and her company Findream are accused of committing a massive Visa fraud. She is charged with faking the OPT program for more than one thousand and three hundred international students with F-1 visas. From 2013 to 2018, she has earned 2.5 million US dollars from this business.
How hard is it for an international student to get a job in the US? This is a question that haunts thousands of undergraduate and graduate international students in the US.
For any international student seeking a job after graduation, the first step is to go through the process of enrolling in an Optional Practical Training (OPT) Program. The OPT program allows student visa holders to stay in the US for at least 12 months of employment directly related to the student’s area of study after their graduation. For STEM major students, the OPT program may extend to three years.
This process may cut off many international students' chance of finding a job because it only allows the students to work in a company for a certain amount of time and the employers must fill out relevant paperwork for the students. When the OPT program ends, the employers have to pay a fortune to sponsor an H-1B work visa for the international workers. On the other hand, H-1B work visa is allocated to international workers on a lottery basis because there are only 65,000 H-1B visas are available each year for workers with bachelor's degrees, and 20,000 more are earmarked for those with master's degrees or higher. According to the Power of International Education, there are 1.09 million current international students in the US.
This episode of Foreign Dreamer Podcast invites Demi Du, a recent Chinese graduate from Boston University’s Master Emerging Media Studies program, to share her experience on finding a job with the OPT program in Boston and her perspective on this recent massive visa fraud scandal.
Why would so many international students decide to pay for a fake job in the US?
Demi's personal experience gives insight into this haunting question and reveals the difficulties for an international student to get employed in the US.