When the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) solicited comments last year about problems plaguing postdocs, a flood of concerns poured in—many from visa holders, who make up 57% of the country’s STEM postdoc population. International postdocs are often treated as “cheap labour,” wrote one respondent. “They have less opportunity to write grants, less network, and [less] secure time to explore and develop skills,” wrote another.
Now, there are numbers to bear out these accounts. Among 2800 academic postdocs working in the United States, those holding temporary visas received lower pay and less career support and guidance than U.S. citizens and permanent residents, even though visa holders were more productive, according to a paper published last month in Research Policy.
The study is “super valuable,” says Andrea Pereyra, assistant director of postdoctoral life design at Johns Hopkins University who moved to the United States from Argentina to do a postdoc in 2017. “The results … were not shocking to me—I’ve heard these stories before, and I’ve seen them,” says Pereyra, who is also a board member and former international chair for the National Postdoctoral Association. But the data are helpful because they are something policymakers and advocates can point to when thinking about how to change the system. “When you come with numeric evidence, I think a lot of people can relate better to that, because anecdotes are just … the experience of that individual.”
The study used data from the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Doctorates Survey, a detailed questionnaire that was administered in 2017 to academic scientists who were within 10 years of completing their Ph.D. Unlike other similar surveys, which largely focus on graduates who received their Ph.D. at a U.S. institution, the 2017 survey was open to any Ph.D. holders working in the U.S. at the time, without regard to where they completed their previous training; it has not been repeated since. “There’s a lot of data on people with U.S. degrees,” notes study author Shulamit Kahn, a professor in the Boston University Questrom School of Business. “But there is very little data on [postdocs] who come with foreign degrees. … It’s a kind of a black box.”
The 2017 survey, however, offers a peek under the lid. Temporary residents who received their Ph.D. abroad—35% of the total respondents—earned 6.8% less as a postdoc than U.S. citizens and permanent residents, the study authors found. That difference far exceeded the gender pay gap (1.7%) observed in the same sample. These temporary residents with Ph.D.s from foreign institutions were also between four and 12 percentage points less likely to collaborate with researchers outside their lab, teach courses during their postdoc, prepare a grant or fellowship proposal, affirm that their supervisor supported them publishing or presenting their work, and report receiving career guidance from their supervisor. International postdocs with U.S. degrees—15% of the study’s sample—didn’t fare much better.
These disparities, Kahn emphasizes, aren’t because international postdocs are “substandard researchers.” On the contrary, postdocs who received their Ph.D. abroad produced 19% more journal articles and published 34% more papers in conference proceedings than U.S.-educated U.S. citizens. “The ones who do come here are usually excellent researchers, and a huge resource,” Kahn says.
It’s not clear why visa-holding postdocs in the survey were paid less on average. Julia Falo-Sanjuan, a molecular biology postdoc at the University of California (UC), Berkeley who is originally from Spain, wonders how much of the disparity is due to those postdocs accepting job offers at universities that pay lower salaries. “I would be very interested in knowing where, geographically, these people were.”
As for the differences in career development opportunities, one limiting factor is that international postdocs aren’t eligible for most individual funding opportunities from U.S. federal agencies. Such grants can add prestige to a scholar’s CV and give them freedom to pursue their own research questions. But for the majority of international postdocs, “the chances of you conducting your own [independent] research, that is never going to happen because you are on somebody else’s time,” Pereyra says.
Another issue, adds Falo-Sanjuan, who serves as an executive board member for the union that represents UC postdocs, is that international postdocs can’t easily move to another job if they end up in an unsupportive or toxic environment. That’s because their visa is tied to their employment. “A lot of postdocs stay because they don’t have a choice,” she says. “Switching to a different lab or a company is really, really complicated.”
Falo-Sanjuan hasn’t experienced that problem herself. But she’s heard many stories about postdocs at UC and elsewhere who have faced unreasonable demands from their supervisor. “It’s so common to say, ‘I won’t process your reappointment and your visa paperwork until you finish this paper, or until you finish this experiment.’” Similar concerns were echoed in many of the comments submitted last year to NIH. “Postdoc positions can be exploitative when hiring international Ph.D. holders,” one respondent wrote. “I have seen several professors with unrealistic expectations for their trainees convert to a lab of primarily international postdocs.”
Many academics would like to see more structures in place to ensure postdoc supervisors are accountable for their actions and aware of what they can do to support international scholars. “There has to be a little bit more of institutional control,” Pereyra says. For instance, administrators could have “conversations with faculty: Have you ever hired an international scholar? … Do you know what they go through? Do you know the immigration dilemmas that they face?” Supervisors should also experience repercussions if they create a toxic environment, she adds.
Universities could also help the situation by granting postdocs contracts that last longer than 1 year, as an NIH working group recommended last year. “The one-year contracts held by many postdoctoral scholars are disproportionately burdensome to international postdoctoral scholars, requiring them to engage in an annual cycle of renewing immigration paperwork which causes stress, financial strain, and job insecurity,” the working group wrote in a report about how to improve conditions for postdocs, submitted to the NIH director. Among other recommendations, the group advised that postdoc contracts be extended to “at least three years.”
This was one of the issues at hand when UC postdocs negotiated a new contract in late 2022, Falo-Sanjuan notes. The union ultimately won a provision stating that incoming postdocs would have a minimum appointment of 2 years. That stability is helpful for all postdocs—and has an added benefit of reducing visa renewals for international scholars, she says. Unions at other universities have made it a priority to push for provisions that help visa holders as well. At Columbia University, for instance, postdocs can now seek reimbursement for fees and travel expenses during the visa renewal process. “Having unions, and having postdocs that fight together for better working conditions—that makes a huge difference,” Falo-Sanjuan says.
Given the central role that international postdocs play in generating research, it’s important that the academic community pay attention to the issue, says study co-author Megan MacGarvie, an associate professor at Questrom. “They make up the majority of a group that is contributing to a very high percentage of research produced by U.S. universities.” The country’s research community shouldn’t take for granted that those scholars will continue to want to come to the U.S., she adds—especially given that the number of postdocs coming to the U.S. has plateaued. “We want to value the work done by international postdocs as a way of continuing to encourage the best students in the world to shoot for the United States.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/international-postdocs-u-s-are-short-changed-more-ways-one
