Under U.S. law, student visas are meant for education, not employment. The F-1 visa allows international students to study full-time at accredited U.S. institutions. It was never meant to be a job program. But over the years, loopholes and quiet policy changes have transformed this visa into one of the biggest threats to American workers.
To receive an F-1 student visa, a foreign national must swear under oath that their sole intent is to come to the United States temporarily for full-time academic study, not to work or remain permanently. They must prove they have sufficient funds to cover tuition and living expenses without needing a job, and they must show strong ties to their home country that will compel them to return after completing their education.
These are not suggestions, they are legal requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Yet companies like Miles Education have built entire business models around violating the spirit, and often the letter, of these conditions, turning what should be a temporary academic pathway into a long-term foreign labor pipeline.
The training program was intended to allow an international student after graduation the opportunity to apply for a short-term work benefit called Optional Practical Training (OPT). It was designed to let students gain experience in their field for up to 12 months. In 2008, this was expanded to 36 months for STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) grads, but only for degrees that truly qualify as STEM and only for training, not full-time careers.
Now here’s what Miles Education did instead.
Miles turned this simple student benefit into a full-blown labor funnel. They packaged everything, college admissions, visa support, orchestrated STEM coursework, and job placement into one commercial service.
They charged students as much as $40,000-$50,000 for guaranteed admission to U.S. universities, OPT work approval, and job placements in American companies, supported by numerous testimonials from models and alumni promising substantial returns on investment for the Miles US Pathway program aimed at Indian nationals. Consequently, the emphasis shifted away from genuine education; the primary objective became clear: to enter the U.S., secure employment, and remain for as long as possible to pursue the American Dream that was purchased not earned.
Federal law states that OPT is not a work visa and is not intended to substitute for American jobs. However, Miles and its university partners have rebranded accounting programs, which do not qualify as STEM, as “STEM degrees” by incorporating terms like analytics and tech tools.
This allows their international students to work in the U.S. for up to three years without oversight, effectively circumventing U.S. workers. They heavily promote this “innovative” three-year work opportunity.
The law mandates that employers must safeguard the U.S. labor market; however, under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, there is no obligation for employers to demonstrate that there are no qualified U.S. workers available for the positions being filled by OPT participants. Additionally, the program lacks wage protection regulations, tax obligations, and does not impose any numerical caps on the number of positions that can be filled by OPT workers. Employers utilizing OPT workers are not required to contribute to Social Security or Medicare taxes, resulting in savings of approximately 8% per hire. This absence of regulation is why large corporations find the program advantageous. Critics argue that this situation constitutes legal exploitation, and organizations like Miles facilitate access to such programs more than ever.
And when those three years are up? Miles just offshores the job. Through its Miles Talent Hub, or one of their other subsidiaries, the same workers are rehired back in India at half the wage, still doing U.S. work from overseas. Miles calls this the “Build-Operate-Transfer” model. It should be called the final nail in the coffin for American graduates.
Everything about this breaks the spirit, and arguably the letter, of immigration law. U.S. regulations say F-1 visa holders must be full-time students and leave the country after their program. They are not supposed to turn into long-term workers or be part of a permanent pipeline for outsourcing. But Miles created a business that does exactly that and U.S. universities, employers, and the government let it happen.
This is the Immigration Industrial Complex in action, foreign companies using our schools, our visas, and our labor laws to displace us in our own country, and profiting from every step of the process.
Read the full exclusive investigation: “Imported degrees, exported jobs: How America’s student visa system became a foreign labor pipeline.”