'It's both': Reddit users blame the weak job market and visa hurdles for international students' struggles
A post on Reddit’s r/InternationalStudents has brought up a question that thousands of international graduates in the United States are likely grappling with: whether the near-impossibility of finding work right now is a job market problem, an immigration policy problem, or both.
The original poster, who recently completed a Master’s in Environmental Management and has until September before their Optional Practical Training (OPT) period expires, laid out the numbers with striking clarity. In November 2025, they made five applications and received two interview invitations. Between January and June 2026, they sent 125 applications and received only two interviews.
“Which one is it?” they asked: the mass cancellations of F1 visas and the chilling effect on employer willingness to hire OPT workers, or a broader job market deterioration affecting everyone?
Reddit’s answer was unambiguous: it’s both. And then some.
“My girlfriend is American with a Brown degree. Still nothing”
The first response immediately dissolved any illusion that the problem might be specific to international students. “My girlfriend is American with a degree from Brown, was laid off in February, still nothing,” one commenter wrote. “So as you know, if you are on OPT, your chances are lower than Americans, and even worse, this administration doesn’t want foreigners. So yeah, it’s harder than ever.”
The double problem the comment describes is the defining feature of the international student job search right now: competing in a market that is already brutal for everyone, while carrying additional barriers that make the search measurably harder than it already is for domestic candidates.
“The toughest it’s been in 10 years, and OPT makes it a steeper hill”
An immigration paralegal in the thread offered a professional perspective that lent the individual's experience some institutional weight. “Getting jobs for any degree major has been the toughest it has been in 10 years, in my opinion, and on top of it, add F1 OPT, and you’re working up a steeper hill. I have seen more and more people laid off in the last year than I have in several years before,” they wrote.
The framing of OPT as making an already steep hill steeper is important. It suggests that even if anti-immigrant sentiment and policy reversed tomorrow, the underlying job market conditions would still make this an exceptionally difficult search.
“Employers can pick and choose, and visas have a bad wrap right now”
Another commenter, who described themselves as one of many applying for dozens of jobs weekly amid widespread tech industry layoffs, explained the employer calculus with uncomfortable directness. “There are literally thousands of layoffs each week at the moment in the professional classes, especially in tech. Employers can pick and choose what they take, and visas with such a bad wrap right now are not going to be top of the pile for consideration for interviews.”
When employers have more qualified applicants than they can process, any additional complexity in the hiring process becomes a reason to deprioritise a candidate.
The MS pipeline is drying up
One of the most detailed and sobering responses in the thread came from someone whose wife had been accepted to multiple Master’s programmes and was speaking with alumni at those schools, most of them Indian nationals, about their experiences after graduation.
“She’s scheduled calls with many alumni at these schools, and as you can expect, most are Indian. They are all telling her how stressed they are because they can’t find jobs, even the ones who’ve had great internships, due to no one sponsoring OPT,” the commenter wrote. They added that many of these same schools were now calling accepted students post-acceptance and “begging” them to come, because the restrictions had so dramatically reduced enrolment from the populations that typically fill those programmes.
It’s a problem that flows in both directions: fewer international students choosing to come, and those who are already here struggling to convert their degrees into employment.
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“You’re also in a field that’s been decimated by government funding cuts”
The thread’s most pointed response added a third dimension to the original poster’s two-part question that they had not considered. “It’s both. You’re also in a field that’s been decimated by government funding cuts,” one commenter wrote, referencing the Trump administration’s cuts to environmental programmes, research funding, and the agencies that employ people with Environmental Management credentials.
For a graduate in this specific field, the job market deterioration is not just cyclical or policy-driven in the immigration sense; instead, it is also the direct result of the gutting of the sector their degree was designed to enter.
Reddit’s collective answer is that what changed is a combination of factors that compound each other in damaging ways for international students: a job market that has deteriorated sharply for everyone, an immigration environment that has made employers actively risk-averse about anything involving visas, and, for this particular graduate, an industry that has been specifically targeted by federal funding cuts.
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