When Shikai Jin looks around at the other students in his computer science courses, he doesn’t see many Americans.

“There’s usually only one or two per class,” he said. “The rest are Indian or Chinese.”

Jin, who is pursuing a Master’s degree in computer science and will graduate from Syracuse University this spring, sees this as evidence that American students choose not to pursue careers in computer science and related fields. So he has a difficult time understanding arguments that international students like him are unfairly taking jobs from Americans in those fields.

Yet that is the case the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech) — a labor union based in Washington state — made by suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2014 in part over an extension to an Optional Practical Training (OPT) program for international students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

OPT allows international students  and recent graduates to work in the U.S. for a year under their F-1 student visas in a field related to their study. The extension, created in 2008, allows STEM graduates to work for an additional 17 months, giving them 29 total months to work while on their student visas.

But the future of the STEM extension is unclear. The 17-month extension rule is set to expire May 10, and a newly-proposed rule by DHS is currently under review at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

If the rule is approved by OMB and includes a STEM extension, it would benefit Jin and other international students at SU and across the country seeking to gain work experience in the U.S. within STEM fields. If not, it would mean most of those students could be forced to pack their bags and return to their home countries within a year after graduation.

“We don’t know what will happen,” said Mary Idzior, associate director for immigration and student services at SU’s Slutzker Center for International Services. “That’s the whole rulemaking process.”

That current state of uncertainty can be traced back to August of last year, when the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, in response to WashTech’s suit, found that DHS’ creation of the extension was a “serious procedural deficiency” because DHS did not provide notice or invite public comment before implementing the extension.

The court ordered the current rule to be vacated but delayed the vacatur until Feb. 12 to give DHS time to submit a new rule. DHS proposed and opened to public comment a new rule on Oct. 19, 2015, that would replace the 17-month extension with a 24-month extension.

On Dec. 22, after receiving more than 50,000 comments on the proposed rule, DHS filed a motion to extend the vacatur date until May 10 — a motion the court granted on Jan. 23.

DHS sent the final rule — which is not yet available to the public — on Feb. 5 to OMB for review, according to nafsa.org.

But WashTech officials are still holding out hope that the extensions “come to an end,” said John Miano, the lawyer representing WashTech and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Miano said the extensions operate as a way to circumvent the H-1B work visas, which are awarded to temporary workers in specialty occupations. That’s unjustifiable, he said, because the extensions are supposed to be student visas, “not a guest worker program.”

“If you read the rule, its entire purpose is to supply the labor industry,” he said. “There’s no mention of education at all. It’s all that employers can’t get enough H-1B workers, ‘so let’s do this instead.’”

But Idzior said the real issue is that there aren’t enough H-1B visas. The STEM extensions, she added, help “fill the gap” that arises due to that shortage of visas.

Congress caps available H-1B visas at 65,000 per year, with an additional 20,000 for graduates who have received a Master’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website.

Meanwhile, some proponents of the extension disagree with Miano’s stance and maintain that the extensions provide a worthwhile addition to students’ education.

Michael Wildes, an immigration lawyer based in New York City, called WashTech’s position “ridiculous” and said that the OPT extensions have “a lot of purpose.”

“OPT and the extension were established to give students a practical bird’s eye view of the academia that they study,” he said.

Others say the driving force behind WashTech’s lawsuit — to “protect American workers,” as Miano put it — is flawed because Americans can’t satisfy the excessive demand for STEM workers.

And while officials at the Center of Immigration Studies argue that the STEM shortage is a myth, a 2014 Brookings Institution study suggests otherwise.

The study found that, on average, openings for STEM-related jobs “requiring a Ph.D. or other professional degree” last 50 days, compared to 33 days for non-STEM jobs. The researchers saw that as evidence that STEM skills are in high demand, “particularly those associated with high levels of educational attainment.”

And it’s international students who are disproportionately achieving those levels of educational attainment.

In June of last year, the Pew Research Center published a study which found that while international students earned just 11.6 percent of all doctoral degrees earned at U.S. colleges and universities in 2012-13, they accounted for 56.9 percent of all doctorates in engineering, 52.5 percent of all doctorates in computer and information sciences and half of all doctorates in mathematics and statistics.

The study also found that in the same year, international students earned 44 percent of all Master’s degrees in computer and informational sciences, 43 percent of all Master’s degrees in engineering and 43 percent of all Master’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.

That was despite international students accounting for 12.6 percent of all Master’s degrees conferred at U.S. colleges and universities that year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

At SU, international students account for 37 percent of total graduate student enrollment this academic year, according to Slutzker Center data.

The College of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Information Studies have the highest number of international students, with 931 and 351 such students, respectively, according to the data. That means international students at those schools account for 53.2 percent of all graduate international students at SU, according to the data.

If the STEM extension were to no longer exist, tech companies and other companies in STEM fields would suffer without those foreign workers, said Wenjuan Jiang, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering as an international student at SU.

Given that, Jiang said she believes the new DHS rule, when published, will include another STEM extension.

If that doesn’t happen, her time left in the U.S. could be very limited. The same would be true for Jin, the graduate student studying computer science.

It would be even worse for some of Jin’s former classmates, who he said are currently using their STEM extensions and working with tech companies, many of which have advocated for more H-1B visas.

“If the extension is canceled, they will have to go back to China,” he said.

Published on February 11, 2016 at 1:19 am

Contact Michael: mdburk01@syr.edu