‘It’s Getting Unfriendlier’: International Students Race to Find Jobs

Students say they have been passed over for jobs and interviews because of visa restrictions. Some have a Plan B: leaving the United States.

For decades, international students hoping to stay in the United States after graduation faced relatively few barriers. Temporary employment programs designed to attract skilled talent made it easy to transition from studying to working. And employers were eager to hire these students, especially those with STEM degrees.

But that once open road to a job in the United States is now full of hurdles.

The Trump administration has upended the H-1B program, a skilled-worker visa sought by many international students, by imposing a $100,000 fee on new applicants and introducing a new lottery based on wage levels. And Homeland Security has indefinitely paused the processing of visa applications for people from 39 countries.

The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services added to the uncertainty by questioning the future of the Optional Practical Training program, which allows international students to work for up to three years in the country after graduation.

There is also a deadline. Most graduating students have up to five months to find a job before being kicked out of the country.

“It’s just getting unfriendlier and unfriendlier,” said Caroline Liu, 21, a Chinese citizen who is a graduating computer science major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Supporters of the new visa rules say that lowering the number of foreign students — 1.3 million in 2025 — will protect jobs for Americans, especially in a challenging job market. Overall hiring has slowed, tech companies are laying off workers by the thousands, and the rise of A.I. has intensified fears that some jobs will disappear altogether.

The unemployment rate for college graduates increased to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, compared with an overall rate of 4.3 percent at the time, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages,” the new fee on H-1B visa applications ensures “that American businesses who actually want to bring high-skilled workers into our country have the certainty they need.”

A few changes to immigration rules may benefit some international students. The new $100,000 fee for H-1B applicants applies only to people who do not already live in the country, meaning that international students in the United States actually had better odds of winning that visa lottery this year because of fewer applications from people abroad.

In interviews with more than a dozen graduating students, few said they had expected an easy path to finding a stateside job, especially in this market.

But the new hurdles, they said, have been frustrating and nerve-racking. Some described promising interviews that suddenly went south when their visa status came up. Others wondered whether the visa question on applications automatically screened them out.

“I applied to over 700 jobs,” said Sid Chakravarthy, 21, a graduating math and economics major at Boston University who was born and raised in Dubai. “The first 500 I think I was getting auto rejected, even for jobs I qualified for.”

Many students had taken out loans or dipped into family savings with the hope that after graduation, they could stay and gain valuable work experience, which could be another step toward settling in the United States in the long term.

- Authors: Amy Qin and Pooja Salhotra, The New York Times

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