September 7, 2026
Idaho’s Other Handout
(In honor of Labor Day)
By: Idaho Senator Brian Lenney
Last time I wrote about Micron’s $50 billion handout and the property tax cap.
I keep hammering H-1B because it’s the one with a name people recognize. It’s also the one with the most rules on it: a cap, a lottery, a prevailing wage requirement, a public filing, etc.
But wait, there’s more!
F-1 is the student visa. A foreign national gets admitted to an American college, the college certifies his enrollment to the feds, and he’s in (we have about a million people here on it right now).
OPT stands for Optional Practical Training. It’s basically a work permit that comes with the degree. Graduate, and you can work full time for any employer for 12 months: no lottery, no prevailing wage, no labor certification. If the degree’s in a STEM field… add 24 more months. Three years of work authorization in the United States, and Congress never voted on it. It came out of a Department of Homeland Security rule in 2008, and the Obama DHS stretched it to its current length in 2016.
CPT is the same idea, moved earlier. Curricular Practical Training lets a student work while he’s still enrolled, as long as the school calls the job part of the curriculum. There’s a whole industry of “day-one CPT” schools built around this, where a foreign man enrolls, works full time from the first week, and shows up to class once a month on a weekend and the school just signs the paperwork.
American kids can’t get on either one because you have to be a foreign national to qualify.
Then there’s J-1 for exchange visitors and trainees, L-1 for moving an employee in from a company’s own foreign office (no cap, no lottery), and O-1 for “extraordinary ability,” which is the workaround of choice for people who miss the H-1B drawing.
An F-1 student is a “nonresident alien” for tax purposes, so neither he nor his employer pays Social Security or Medicare tax on his wages. That’s +7.65% off the top for the company. Hire a kid from Nampa at $85,000 and Micron owes about $6,500 a year in payroll tax on him. Hire the OPT graduate at the same salary and it owes zero.
Yes, the federal government built a discount into hiring the foreigner over the local.
By year three the company enters him in the H-1B lottery and every year on OPT is another ticket. Win, and he’s on the H-1B visa, tied to the employer, unlikely to quit, and unlikely to complain because his employer now controls his immigration status. Like an indentured servant. Lose, and there’s usually a way to buy more time: get another degree, another OPT clock.
So the sequence runs F-1, then CPT or OPT, then H-1B, then green card sponsorship. Micron didn’t invent it, but it runs on it. Those 573 labor condition applications are the back end of a pipeline whose front end is a master’s program.
Universities like money and foreign students pay full tuition, usually the out-of-state rate. A one-year master’s in computer engineering aimed at foreign enrollment is about the most profitable thing a public college can run. At a lot of American schools, about 70% of full-time grad students in computer science and electrical engineering are here on a visa.
It’s our own kind of diploma mill, where an entire graduate program exists to sell the work permit, with the degree as packaging.
Texas, California, and New York mastered this grift:
- The state builds the engineering school with taxpayer money
- The school fills the master’s programs with F-1 students, who pay more
- The employer down the road hires off OPT because it’s cheaper
- The state’s own kids get the undergrad seat, the bill, and a graduate program where the assistantships were spoken for before they applied.
If you want to see what that looks like after twenty years of it, Tyler Oliveira put out a documentary in April:
He walks around Frisco and Argyle asking software engineers how they got here, and he gets the same answer over and over: student visa, then OPT, then H-1B. He has another one on H-1B “ghost offices” too. Those are the staffing firms that sponsor a worker on paper and lease him out to whoever’s actually paying.
He didn’t find this. It’s federal regulation and you can read the rule yourself. That’s the part that should bother you. This is a rule, not law.
Nobody had to break anything.
Now look at Boise State.
Micron’s name is on the business building and the materials research center. Idaho taxpayers fund the College of Engineering. So the company that already has a permanent property tax cap and a sales tax exemption also gets a stream of graduates it pays no payroll tax on, produced at a school it doesn’t pay for.
That’s a fourth subsidy.
And OPT has no floor. H-1B at least has a prevailing wage rule on paper. OPT has a form where the employer writes down a “training plan” and promises the pay is “commensurate.” But nobody audits it, there’s no requirement the employer tried an American first, and there’s no cap on the number.
It’s the loosest work authorization in the country and the word “visa” isn’t even in the name.
Idaho can’t rewrite federal immigration law or change federal rules.
Of course our congressmen could have some sway there, but we know that’s not happening with the current guys, busy as they are pushing illegal immigration… and making TikTok dance videos.
The state does have a card to play here though, in theory.
Every Idaho public university that enrolls an F-1 student does it because it applied for and holds the federal certification to do it, and every H-1B it sponsors is a decision its own office makes. Those are state institutions on state money, and the legislature sets the terms of state money. So we could pass a law saying state-funded schools don’t certify F-1 enrollment, don’t sign CPT or OPT training plans, and don’t sponsor H-1B petitions.
It would never get a hearing though.
You know how it works. The men who fund the engineering school and the men who fund the campaigns are, in a lot of cases, the same men. A legislator who took their check in October knows exactly who they answer to in January, and it isn’t the guy who voted for them. The lobbyist is in their office every week, picking up the bar tab, the dinner tab, and who knows what else. The voter shows up once every two years and buys nothing.
Guess who they’re going to listen to.
If a kid from Delhi wants to build chips in Boise he should come the way people have come here for 200 years: an employer pays him the same as the guy next to him, pays the same taxes on him, and he can quit whenever he wants.
I’ll hear that without foreign grad students the engineering programs shrink. Then run them for Idahoans. Boise State exists to educate Idaho’s kids. But a grad program that only makes sense if most of the seats go to foreigners is a business the state has no reason to be a part of.
And this isn’t only about Micron. It’s any company whose engineering seats go to somebody who arrived on a student visa, took the OPT discount, and got parked on H-1B, while the Nampa kid with the same degree from the same school is out bidding against people his employer can hire for less.
We call that a labor market.
It’s a rigged one, and we helped rig it.
