A broken U.S. immigration system threatens the country’s status as a global leader in research, according to a new report by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The report calls for allowing more immigrants with advanced degrees to remain in the country, which relies heavily on foreign-born scientists.
The report also criticizes the China Initiative, a now-defunct Department of Justice (DOJ) effort to prevent Chinese economic espionage that led to few prosecutions but was widely regarded as targeting scientists of Chinese descent. The panel urges the government “to take measures to address the lingering chilling effects of the China Initiative.” Gisela Kusakawa, who leads the Asian American Scholar Forum, calls the critique a “milestone” for a NASEM report.
The panel was asked by the Department of Defense to examine the international competition for scientists and, in particular, China’s myriad talent programs, which aggressively recruited U.S. scientists for more than a decade. But its chair, Mark Barteau, chair of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, says the group quickly decided it also needed to examine U.S. immigration policy and the supply of domestic STEM talent.
“When you look at what we need to do to be competitive for high-level talent,” Barteau says, “you have to address the impediments as well as any future incentives that might be created.”
The report calls on Congress and the White House to make it easier for immigrants earning advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math fields to remain in the country. “Congress’s failure to disentangle visa and immigration policies for students, STEM degree holders, and technology entrepreneurs from the broader challenges of comprehensive immigration reform represents a self-inflicted wound,” Barteau writes in a preface to the report. “By constricting the pipeline leading to legal permanent residency … we limit our access to talent in cutting-edge fields where leadership is critical to our national security.”
One recommended change to current immigration laws would boost the number of foreign-born experts in designated STEM fields who could receive a green card—status as a permanent resident with a path to citizenship. Another change would remove the cap on green cards for natives of specific countries, a provision that has led to decadeslong waits for those from China and India. A third reform would give green cards to everyone who wanted to remain in the country after earning an advanced degree from a U.S. university.
Those recommendations are in line with provisions in various bills that never passed because of the bitterly partisan fight over the related issue of border security. Barteau says the panel hopes “framing it as a national security issue” might win over some lawmakers who up to now have refused to back any legislation helping more foreign-born scientists remain in the country until there’s agreement on how to stanch the flow of illegal immigration.
“Every once in a while, the door cracks open and there’s an opportunity for legislation,” he says. “But I wouldn’t want to take bets on what year that might happen.”
The panel also warned that policies that restrict the flow of international talent in the name of protecting national security will backfire if they are seen as ill-founded or discriminatory. It notes that the China Initiative of former President Donald Trump’s administration, which President Joe Biden ended in 2022, was “highly problematic” because of “its disproportionate focus on fundamental research in academia.”
Although most academic scientists targeted by DOJ were eventually exonerated, the investigations and related probes by the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies “created a climate of uncertainty and fear, especially among Asian American scientists, that persists even now,” the report notes. It urges that going forward, federal efforts to safeguard research should focus on “ensuring compliance with applicable research policies rather than prosecution.”
Kusakawa applauds the report’s call for greater transparency surrounding the rules governing research security, predicting it will “reduce the potential chilling effects on the research community” by strengthening their trust of the government. She also welcomes the panel’s recommendation that the government not “unduly inhibit international collaborations involving fundamental research” by, for example, banning all interactions with a foreign institution or entity regardless of subject matter.
“Unnecessary restrictions are not in our country’s interests,” she says, “and may create environments not conducive to attracting and retaining talent.”
In addition to the need to retain foreign-born STEM talent, the report recommends a massive investment aimed at attracting more domestic students into STEM fields akin to the push after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. But that could take a very long time, Barteau predicts, using as an analogy how long it took the United States to achieve energy independence.
“Richard Nixon [in 1973] was the first U.S. president to say that the solution is not to turn off imports but to boost domestic production,” Barteau says. “And it took us decades to achieve it. I'm not sure the timeline between oil and STEM talent is all that different.”
