Lower Immigration Is Lifting Blue-Collar Workers. Washington Is Still Subsidizing Competition for College Grads.

For most American workers, the job market has quietly turned into one of the best in a generation. That was the finding of a Wall Street Journal report this week on the labor market for people who never finished college, which is to say the majority of the country. Unemployment for workers between 22 and 34 without a degree has rarely been lower in the past two decades, according to an analysis the Journal commissioned from the Burning Glass Institute. Electricians, welders, restaurant staff, security guards, nurses, and construction crews are all seeing unemployment rates near the bottom of their own historical ranges.

The Journal did not leave readers guessing about the cause. Much of it, the paper wrote, comes down to supply and demand, as older tradespeople retire “and immigration drops.” That is a plain description of what has happened over the past year and a half. The foreign-born population has fallen by an estimated nearly three million since January 2025, according to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey. The Census Bureau and Brookings estimate that net migration (legal and illegal) dropped by half between the summer of 2024 and the summer of 2025. The low-wage sectors where illegal workers are concentrated are now bidding for American workers instead of taking them for granted. Friday’s jobs report showed restaurants and bars alone adding 59,000 jobs in August, more than a third of everything the economy added that month.

Plenty of workers are still on the sidelines. The Journal, citing Brookings data, notes that close to a quarter of younger workers with only a high-school diploma are not in the labor force at all. Those are people who could be pulled back in by rising wages, if Congress decides to manage immigration policy with Americans first in mind.

The other half of the story

The same report describes a very different market for young people who did go to college. Workers between 22 and 34 with a bachelor’s degree are seeing unemployment worse, relative to their own history, than at almost any point since 2003, and it is worse still for people in science and technology. The Journal profiles a University of Cincinnati graduate who sent seventy applications and got three interviews before giving up and enrolling in business school. Gad Levanon, Burning Glass’s chief economist, does not think this is a passing phase. There is a rapidly growing supply of people with degrees, he told the paper, and a rapid decline in people without them.

So employers have more young graduates than they can hire, and fewer young non-graduates than they would like. An immigration policy designed around American workers would respond to that by leaving the bottom of the market alone and easing off the top. Federal policy does the reverse.

A subsidy for hiring foreign graduates

Optional Practical Training is the program that lets foreign students stay in the United States and work after graduation, for a year in most fields and three years in science, technology, engineering, and math. Nothing in the immigration statute creates it. It grew out of an old regulatory allowance for student work experience, and the Department of Homeland Security expanded it by rule, most recently in 2016, until it became one of the largest foreign-worker programs in the country, larger in most years than the H-1B program that gets the attention.

What makes OPT distinctive is the tax treatment. Because participants are still technically students, neither they nor their employers pay Social Security or Medicare taxes on their wages. For an employer choosing between two new graduates with the same degree, that is a discount of roughly 15 percent on the foreign candidate, worth billions of dollars a year in forgone payroll taxes. The program does not require employers to look for an American first, does not set a prevailing wage, and does not cap how many can be hired.

That is the market recent American graduates are walking into: an entry-level professional job market near its two-decade low, with a federal program on the other side of the table paying employers to prefer someone else.

What Congress can do

Because OPT was built by regulation, an administration can shrink it, and the next administration can rebuild it. Only a statute settles the question. Two bills would do that. In the House, Rep. Paul Gosar’s H.R. 2315, the Fairness for High-Skilled Americans Act, would end the program outright and bar any successor unless Congress votes to create one. In the Senate, Sen. Jim Banks’s S. 2821, the American Tech Workforce Act, would end OPT and require employers who use H-1B visas to pay a real wage floor.

The Journal’s report is, in its way, the case for both. Reducing the supply of foreign labor is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do for Americans without degrees. Congress can extend the same logic to the Americans who finished college and are now wondering why the diploma did not come with a job.