EMILY KWONG: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here. So the next four years are likely to be difficult for foreign-born scientists who want to work in the United States. That's because the incoming Trump administration wants to make it harder for these scientists to get a work visa or a green card. Jon Hamilton is with me. As a science correspondent who regularly talks to a lot of these scientists, you've been reporting on what this could mean for research in the US, right?
JON HAMILTON: I have. And it sounds like it could be trouble. Because even though President-elect Donald Trump's focus has been on deporting millions of undocumented residents, that effort could spill over into the visas that allow a lot of foreign-born scientists to work here legally.
KWONG: Why is there such a concern that that will happen?
HAMILTON: The concern is based on what happened during Trump's first term. You know, that was from 2017 to 2021. And early on, the president made a point of targeting a type of visa that allows many scientists and engineers to work in the US. It's known as an H-1B visa, and it's for foreign workers who hold at least a bachelor's degree and who have skills that are needed by US companies and research institutions.
KWONG: I do remember this, the conflict over H-1B visas. And those are used by people who are doing, let's say, computer software engineering at places like Amazon or Google. A lot of tech hubs use these visas.
HAMILTON: Yeah, that's right. I mean, even Elon Musk says he worked under an H-1B visa before becoming a citizen.
KWONG: Really? OK.
HAMILTON: But, you know, it's not just the tech sector. A lot of researchers at the National Institutes of Health are working under an H-1B visa. But Trump saw the visas as a way to replace US workers with cheaper foreign labor. You know, back in 2017, just a couple of months into his first term, he gave this speech at Snap-on Tools in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was standing in front of this American flag made of red, white, and blue wrenches.
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PRESIDENT TRUMP: This will stop. American workers have long called for reforms to end these visa abuses. And today, their calls are being answered for the first time. That includes taking the first steps to set in motion a long overdue reform of H-1B visas.
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HAMILTON: It's worth noting here that Snap-on Tools itself has employees working under an H-1B, though the president may not have known that at the time.
KWONG: And he followed through on this promise, though, in his first term.
HAMILTON: He absolutely did. He used an executive order to make H-1B visas much harder to get.
KWONG: Yeah.
HAMILTON: The denial rate for those visas doubled or tripled, depending on whose statistics you use. Some specialties were no longer eligible. And then in 2020, he temporarily closed the borders to people trying to enter with an H-1B visa. The architect of a lot of this effort was Stephen Miller, who was a policy advisor to Trump at the time. Now Miller is back as Trump's homeland security advisor and the deputy chief of staff. And all of this is making a lot of research institutions wonder whether they're in for another battle over visas.
KWONG: Today on the show, how a change in immigration policy could cause a scientific brain drain.
HAMILTON: And why other countries could stand to benefit.
KWONG: You are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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KWONG: OK, Jon Hamilton, let's talk about H-1B visas. How many people currently are working under them?
HAMILTON: It's somewhere around 600,000. So Congress set an overall cap of 85,000 new H-1B visas each year, and they allow a person to work for up to six years. But of those 85,000 visas that are granted each year, 20,000 are reserved for workers who have at least a master's degree from a university in the US. Also, to be considered for any H-1B visa, you need to be sponsored by an employer who declares that no US worker is being displaced.
KWONG: Oh, I didn't realize that. So in order to offer it as an employer, you have to demonstrate there wasn't a competitive US candidate that could fill that role.
HAMILTON: Exactly. The employers also must pay at least the prevailing wage to anyone working under an H-1B. And I should add that this is what's called a nonimmigrant visa. That means it's designed to be a guest worker program for highly educated people, not a path to citizenship.
KWONG: Got it. OK, so how important are these H-1B visas then to science in the US?
HAMILTON: They're pretty important. You know, when you walk through a typical research lab in the US, you tend to encounter scientists from all over the world-- Europe, the UK, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, South America, you know, everywhere.
KWONG: It's true.
HAMILTON: Right?
KWONG: Yeah.
HAMILTON: A lot of them came to the US as students because we have some of the best schools in the world. That means they probably came here under a student visa. But in order to stay and work, they need to either get a green card, which is not a visa. It gives a person permanent residence, and so it's hard to get. Or they need to get a visa, often an H-1B.
KWONG: What happens when H-1B visas get then more difficult to obtain?
HAMILTON: One thing that happens is that some of the very best scientists simply choose to work somewhere else. I spoke about that with a brain scientist named Raymundo Báez-Mendoza. For me, he kind of personifies the world of high-level science. He was born in Mexico, got his master's at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, then his PhD at Cambridge University in the UK.
KWONG: (LAUGHING) That's impressive. That's an impressive roster.
HAMILTON: When I first met Raymundo back in 2019, he was working at Massachusetts General Hospital in Harvard Medical School under an H-1B visa.
KWONG: Wow, yeah.
HAMILTON: And this was at a scientific meeting in Chicago. And Raymundo was there because he was presenting a poster on behalf of another scientist named Hamidreza Ramezanpour.
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RAYMUNDO BÁEZ-MENDOZA: So I'm a colleague of Hamidreza. He's a great scientist, and he's based in Germany. And he wanted to come here to present his work. And he was unable because his visa was denied.
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HAMILTON: That was because Hamidreza had an Iranian passport. This was during what was called Trump's "Muslim ban," which closed the border to people with passports from certain countries, including Iran.
KWONG: Do we know where Hamidreza is now?
HAMILTON: I believe he is now at York University in Toronto, Canada.
KWONG: So not in the US. And what about Raymundo? Did he stay at Harvard?
HAMILTON: Nope. The European Union offered him a grant to start a lab in Germany. So he's in Göttingen, studying the brain circuits involved in social interactions. I actually called him up after Trump got re-elected, to see what he thought. He says he didn't choose Europe just because of the visa policies he encountered during Trump's first term. But he did talk about living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is this kind of bubble. He says, when he went outside that bubble, he saw things like road signs that were pretty hostile to immigrants. So all that kind of factored into his decision. And now, Raymundo is really pretty worried that if the incoming administration goes after H-1B visas again, it could really hurt the US scientific enterprise.
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BÁEZ-MENDOZA: Other countries that are more open towards immigration and towards immigrants will stand to gain. And that was a little bit the case with Brexit. A lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain.
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KWONG: Right, Brexit. I mean, among the many things it did, it made it a lot harder for scientists in the European Union to work in the UK.
HAMILTON: It did. And we're talking about some really top-ranked international scientists here. You know, they've lived in different countries, maybe of them speak several languages. They have got options.
KWONG: Yeah.
HAMILTON: Institutions compete to get them. So if you put up barriers in one country, these top people are likely to go somewhere else.
KWONG: Oh, they're in demand.
HAMILTON: They are, indeed. I have been talking with another brain scientist about that very thing. Her name is Leili Mortazavi. She was born in Iran, was living in Canada, and then wanted to go to graduate school at Stanford. But she almost didn't get to go there because she still had an Iranian passport.
KWONG: Oh, wow.
HAMILTON: She got a Canadian passport just in time to attend Stanford. When I spoke with her in 2019, she was just beginning her studies there. But even then, Leili was pretty concerned about visa and immigration policies that seemed designed to keep out people like her.
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LEILI MORTAZAVI: Everyone I meet here is very welcoming. But for sure, it's kind of sad to be in a country that has these policies in effect. I really hope that they change soon.
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KWONG: It sounds similar. Like, Stanford is a bubble of welcoming. But beyond that, the policies are not.
HAMILTON: That is exactly correct. And it's worth noting that her hope came true, temporarily. The policies did change under President Biden. H-1B visas got easier to get and so on. But now, with the incoming Trump administration, they're likely to change back. And they could get even more restrictive. I spoke with Leili again after Trump's re-election, and she says she expects to get her PhD in just a few months. Then she'll have to decide whether to look for a job in the US or somewhere else.
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MORTAZAVI: I really like Stanford. Stanford people here are great. The resources are amazing. But as I said, I would have to see what kinds of changes happen under Trump.
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KWONG: So do you have any sense of what Leili's going to do?
HAMILTON: It's unclear. But I do know she's looking at jobs in Canada and the UK, and that's pretty typical for people who have that sort of academic pedigree. You know, the very scientists who could be most valuable to research institutions in the US are the same scientists who have the greatest ability to go somewhere else.
KWONG: Have you heard from people that this kind of policy would allow for opportunities in the sciences for American citizens?
HAMILTON: What I hear is that American schools do not produce nearly enough top-level scientists to fill all the jobs that are out there. This is not a desire to hire foreign workers. This is labs and research institutions looking to get the best people they can. And they're just not finding enough US citizen US graduates to fill those jobs. One interesting thing I found was that I called more than half a dozen research institutions, universities, and other academic places. Not one wanted to talk on the record, which tells me that they are really concerned about being targeted for criticizing this policy before it arrives.
KWONG: Jon Hamilton, science correspondent for NPR, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.
HAMILTON: Always a pleasure.
KWONG: Short Wavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcast platform you're listening to right now. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, and it was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
HAMILTON: And I'm Jon Hamilton.
KWONG: See you tomorrow for more Short Wave from NPR.
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