Who Does Science? Under Trump, That Could Change

The next four years may be challenging for foreign-born scientists who want to work in the United States. Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U. S., but the incoming Trump administration wants to make it harder for them to get H-1B visas. Some scientists worry a scarcity of H-1B visas may prompt top foreign researchers to work in other countries. If you liked this episode, consider checking out some more episodes on the brain, including the neuroscience of disagreements https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/1257825199/family-thanksgiving-holidays-politics-disagreements, fear https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/1210938257/fear-anxiety-scary-movie-horrorand fruit flies https://www.npr.org/2024/10/07/1210935851/ai-brain-fruit-fly-map-connectome. Questions or ideas you want us to consider for a future episode? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. We'd love to hear from you! See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Emily Kwong?

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Emily Kwong?

  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?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  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 ever could spill over into the visas that allow a lot of foreign-born scientists to work here legally.

• 1:05Emily Kwong?

  Why is there such a concern that that will happen?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  The concern is based on what happened during Trump's first term. 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 H1B 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.

• 1:32Emily Kwong?

  I do remember this, the conflict over H1B visas. And those are used by people who are doing, let's say, computer or software engineering at places like Amazon or Google, a lot of tech hubs.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, even Elon Musk says he worked under an H1B visa before becoming a citizen.

• 1:49Emily Kwong?

  Really? Okay.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  But you know, it's not just the tech sector. A lot of researchers at the National Institutes of Health are working under an H1B 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.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  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 H1B visas.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It's worth noting here that Snap-on Tools itself has employees working under an H1B, though the president may not have known that at the time.

• 2:42Emily Kwong?

  And he followed through on this, promised, though, in his first term.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  He absolutely did. He used an executive order to make H1B visas much harder to get.

• 2:51Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  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 H1B visa. The architect of a lot of this effort was Stephen Miller, who was a policy adviser to Trump at the time. Now, Miller is back as Trump's Homeland Security Advisor and 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.

• 3:29Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, how a change in immigration policy could cause a scientific brain drain.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And why other countries could stand to benefit.

• 3:40Emily Kwong?

  You are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 5:05Speaker 04

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• 5:21Emily Kwong?

  Okay, John Hamilton, let's talk about H1B visas. How many people currently are working under them?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  It's somewhere around 600,000. So Congress set an overall cap of 85,000 new H1B 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 H1B visa, you need to be sponsored by an employer who declares that no US worker is being displaced.

• 5:58Emily 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?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. The employers also must pay at least the prevailing wage to anyone working under an H1B. And I should add that this is what's called a non-immigrant visa. That means it's designed to be a guest worker program for highly educated people, not a path to citizenship.

• 6:23Emily Kwong?

  Got it. Okay. So how important are these H1B visas then to science in the US?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  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, right? 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 H1B.

• 7:03Emily Kwong?

  What happens when H1B visas get then more difficult to obtain?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  One thing that happens is that some of the very best scientists simply choose to work somewhere else. I mean, I spoke about that with a brain scientist named Raimundo Baez-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.

• 7:28Emily Kwong?

  That's impressive. That's an impressive roster.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  When I first met Raimundo back in 2019, he was working at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School under an H1B visa.

• 7:40Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And this was at a scientific meeting in Chicago. And Raimundo was there because he was presenting a poster on behalf of another scientist named Hamidreza Ramazanpour.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  So I'm a colleague of Hamidreza. He's a great scientist, and he's based in Germany. He wanted to come here to, you know, present his work, and he wasn't able because his visa was denied.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:16Emily Kwong?

  Do we know where Hamidreza is now?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I believe he is now at York University in Toronto, Canada.

• 8:23Emily Kwong?

  So not in the US. And what about Raimundo? Did he stay at Harvard?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Nope. The European Union offered him a grant to start a lab in Germany. So he's in Gottingen studying the brain circuits involved in social interactions. I actually called him up after Trump got re-elected to see what he thought. And 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, you know, he saw things like road signs that were pretty hostile to immigrants. So all that kind of factored into his decision. And now, Raimundo is really pretty worried that if the incoming administration goes after H1B visas again, it could really hurt the US scientific enterprise.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Other countries 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.

• 9:33Emily 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.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  It did. And we're talking about some really top-ranked international scientists here. You know, they've lived in different countries, many of them speak several languages. They have got options. Institutions compete to get them. So if you put up barriers in one country, these top people are likely to go somewhere else.

• 9:58Emily Kwong?

  Oh, they're in demand.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  They are indeed. I have been talking with another brain scientist about that very thing. Her name is Lele 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. 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, Lele was pretty concerned about visa and immigration policies that seemed designed to keep out people like her.

• 10:34Speaker 07

  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.

• 10:47Emily Kwong?

  It sounds similar, like Stanford is a bubble of welcoming, but beyond that, the policies are not.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  That is exactly correct. And it's worth noting that, you know, her hope came true temporarily. The policies did change under President Biden. H1B 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 Lele again after Trump's reelection, 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.

• 11:23Speaker 07

  I really like Stanford. Stanford people here are great. The resources are amazing. But as I said, like, I would have to see what kinds of changes happen under Trump.

• 11:36Emily Kwong?

  So do you have any sense of what Leilei is going to do?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:56Emily Kwong?

  Have you heard from people that this kind of policy would allow for opportunities in the sciences for American citizens?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 12:50Emily Kwong?

  John Hamilton, science correspondent for NPR. Thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 12:59Emily 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.

• 13:12Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, and it was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones, check the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And I'm John Hamilton.

• 13:26Emily Kwong?

  See you tomorrow for more Short Wave from NPR.

• 13:47Speaker 05

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