Follow-Up: Comment Periods for Three Visa Rules Close Next Week: OPT Fee, 60-Day Grace Period and Deference
Three Department of Homeland Security proposals that would reshape life on work and student visas close for public comment next week: the Optional Practical Training (OPT) fee proposal on November 9, the proposal to end the 60-day grace period on November 10, and the proposal to remove deference to prior approvals on November 13. None of the three is final. Until final rules are published with an effective date, the current rules remain in effect.
According to the proposed rules published in the Federal Register and Regulations.gov figures as of November 2, 2026, public participation in the three dockets bears little relation to the dollar stakes the department itself estimated. The OPT fee proposal (docket ICEB-2026-0100), published October 8, would require SEVP-certified schools to pay $70,000 for an initial OPT recommendation for each F-1 student and $30,000 for each subsequent OPT recommendation for the same student; it had drawn 4,844 comments as of November 2. The department estimates the fee would raise $12.4 billion a year in fees under its primary estimate, within a range of $8.4 billion to $16.5 billion, from 2,478 certified schools. It is the only one of the three that the department classifies as economically significant.
The proposal to end the 60-day grace period (docket USCIS-2026-0364), published September 11, would delete 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2), the provision that lets an eligible worker whose qualifying employment ends stay up to 60 days to find a new sponsor or change status without being considered to have failed to maintain status solely because the worker stopped working. It had drawn 27,123 comments as of November 2, about 84 percent of the roughly 32,400 comments filed across the three dockets. The department gave no monetized cost or benefit for that proposal; a tech industry group has put its cost at $263 million a year. The proposal covers H-1B, L-1, O-1, TN and E workers.
The proposal to remove deference to prior approvals (docket USCIS-2026-0529), published October 14, would stop USCIS from deferring to its own earlier approvals when employers file for extensions. It had drawn only 416 comments as of November 2, about 1 percent of the total. The department estimates its cost at $133,987 a year, counting only paperwork for about 6,044 additional requests for evidence. Yet the proposal reaches about 208,429 extension petitions a year across nearly every Form I-129 category, from H-1B and L-1 to O-1, P, R-1 and TN.
All three comment periods close before midnight Eastern time: November 9 for the OPT fee proposal, November 10 for the grace-period proposal, and November 13 for the deference proposal. A separate Paperwork Reduction Act comment window on the OPT fee proposal's information collection runs to December 7. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an agency must consider significant comments and respond to them when it issues a final rule; arguments never raised in comments are harder to press later in court. The comment count does not decide the outcome: a single detailed comment carrying data the agency lacked can carry more weight than many form letters.
None of the three proposals changes anything today. A worker laid off this week still has the grace period, OPT carries no new fee, and USCIS deference remains in place. What next week fixes is the evidence the department must answer before finishing any of the three rules, a step that often takes months for rules of this scope.
Source: Federal Register
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：美国公民及移民服务局总部（GSM 固定图库）。USCIS headquarters. (GSM asset library)
