A heated debate has recently erupted between two groups of supporters of President Donald Trump. The dispute concerns the H-1B visa system that allows U.S. employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations – mostly in the tech industry.
On the one hand, there are people such as Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who has called the H-1B program a “total and complete scam.” On the other, there are tech tycoons such as Elon Musk who think skilled foreign workers are crucial to the U.S. tech sector.
The H-1B visa program is subject to an annual limit of new visas, which sits at 65,000 per fiscal year. There is also an additional annual quota of 20,000 H-1B visas for highly skilled international students.
The H-1B program is the primary vehicle for international graduate students at U.S. universities to work here after graduation. At most American research universities, much of science, technology, engineering and mathematics research is carried out by international graduate students.
As a computer science professor – and an immigrant – I believe the debate over H-1B overlooks important questions: Why does the U.S. rely so heavily on foreign workers in tech, and why can’t it develop a homegrown tech workforce?
The U.S. has been a magnet for global scientific talent since before World War II.
Many of the scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb were European refugees. After World War II, U.S. policies such as the Fulbright Program expanded opportunities for international educational exchange.
Attracting international students to the U.S. has had positive results.
Among Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, medicine or physics since 2000, 40% have been immigrants. Tech industry giants Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Google LLC were all founded by first- or second-generation immigrants.
Restricting foreign graduate students’ path to U.S. employment, as some prominent Trump supporters have called for, could significantly reduce the number of international graduate students in U.S. universities.
About 80% of graduate students in American computer science and engineering programs – roughly 18,000 students in 2023 – are international students.
The loss of international doctoral students would significantly diminish the research capability of graduate programs. After all, doctoral students, supervised by principal investigators, carry out the bulk of research.
It must be emphasized that international students make a significant contribution to U.S. research output. For example, scientists born outside the U.S. played key roles in the development of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. So making the U.S. less attractive to international graduate students would hurt U.S. research competitiveness.
So, why is there such a reliance on foreign students? And why hasn’t America created an adequate pipeline of U.S.-born students for its technical workforce?
I have found that there are not enough qualified domestic doctoral applicants. It seems as if the doctoral career track is simply not attractive enough to many U.S. undergrad computer science students. But why?
The top annual salary in Silicon Valley for new computer science graduates can reach $115,000. Doctoral students in research universities, in contrast, do not receive a salary. Instead, they get a stipend. They typically are paid less than $40,000 annually. The opportunity cost of pursuing a doctorate is, thus, up to $100,000 per year. And obtaining a doctorate typically takes six years.
So, pursuing a doctorate is not an economically viable decision for many Americans. The reality is that a doctoral degree opens new career options, but most bachelor’s degree holders do not see beyond the economics.
The U.S. is locked in a cold war with China focused mostly on technological dominance. So maintaining its research-and-development edge is in the national interest.
Yet the U.S. has declined to make the requisite investment in research.
Instead of trying to address this problem, the U.S. has found a way to meet its academic research needs by recruiting and admitting international students. The steady stream of highly qualified international applicants has allowed the U.S. to ignore the inadequacy of the domestic doctoral pipeline.
The current debate about the H-1B visa system provides the U.S. with an opportunity for introspection.
Yet the news from Washington, D.C., about massive budget cuts coming to the National Science Foundation seems to suggest the federal government is about to take an acute problem and turn it into a crisis.
Moshe Y. Vardi is a professor of computer science at Rice University. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
