Immigration Fuels Innovation in Science to Make the U.S. More Competitive

Immigration Fuels Innovation in Science to Make the U.S. More Competitive

By The Editors edited by Megha Satyanarayana

In late December 2024 a social media storm erupted after entrepreneur Elon Musk blasted out support for the iconic H-1B visa. The temporary work visa has long served as a ticket to jobs in the U.S. high-tech industry for skilled foreign-born scientists and engineers. In response, President Donald Trump’s nativist backers pushed back immediately. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon characterized Musk’s position as a ploy by tech oligarchs to take jobs from Americans. Headlines proclaimed the outbreak of a MAGA civil war.

Musk’s remarks might seem self-serving, but he is right in highlighting the need for more engineering talent from overseas. Foreign-born tech workers are essential to fuel America’s powerhouse economy, one that captures an outsized percentage of global gross domestic product compared with its population. And they will be key for hiring the more than one million additional STEM workers that will be needed in 2033 compared with 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This increase marks a 10 percent growth rate, almost three times what is projected for any non-STEM industry during the same period.

Immigrants are a big part of what has made America a global leader in science and technology; if Trump’s nativist faction prevails and restricts the entry of skilled workers, that will have profound effects on this leadership role, as well as on the U.S. economy.

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Closing borders is a mistake. The tech elite know this. Musk, who was born in South Africa and now heads an advisory committee for the Trump administration called the Department of Government Efficiency, is one of many tech magnates who rely on the H-1B visa. Musk’s Tesla company received approvals for 742 H-1B petitions for new hires during the 2024 federal fiscal year, more than double the number from a year earlier. Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos) applied for nearly 3,900 H-1Bs in 2024. Most of the 25 companies that made the most H-1B requests in 2024 are technology firms, including Microsoft, Infosys and Meta, the parent company of Facebook (run by Mark Zuckerberg).

Cutting off the flow of foreign workers by rejecting H-1B applications can negatively impact local economies and even hurt U.S. workers.

Despite the claims from Bannon and other hard-right MAGA supporters that H-1Bs rob American citizens of skilled jobs, the pipeline for domestic talent alone is unlikely to fill looming employment gaps. U.S. math scores have dropped, and the educational infrastructure at the most basic level is often just not there: only half of U.S. high schools offer calculus, and 60 percent provide physics classes. Both skills are critical for designing quantum computers and achieving innovations in artificial intelligence.

According to study estimates, just 3 percent or so of America’s high school graduates join the ranks of STEM workers. Prominent legislation to promote STEM education has not met its funding targets. The Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act set out to invest billions of dollars in STEM education, but the funding appropriated for the National Science Foundation has been hundreds of millions less than what was originally requested.

In addition to industry jobs, the basic and applied research that takes place at the nation’s universities and tech hubs is highly reliant on overseas talent. An August 2024 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) notes that contributions from the large cadre of international students are critical to sustaining current levels of research in U.S. graduate programs. Foreign-born employees make up 43 percent of U.S. STEM workers who hold doctoral degrees, and this number rises to nearly 60 percent in computer science and certain other fields.

These professionals bring abundant benefits to the STEM workforce. In 2022 more than half of U.S. start-ups with valuations greater than $1 billion had at least one immigrant at their helm—and the value of foreign-born professionals in this country can be witnessed on the global stage at the highest levels of human achievement: 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics in the past two decades have been immigrants.

Uncertainties about immigration for tech jobs—reflected by the internal strife in the Trump team and among its supporters—could result in fractured policymaking, with foreign-born STEM workers getting placed under the same anti-immigrant policymaking umbrella as undocumented immigrants.

In the fusillades of the MAGA civil war, Trump took Musk’s side, saying he has always been a big backer of H-1Bs, although the president has previously said the opposite. He once called the visas “very, very bad for workers.” In fact, during Trump’s first term his administration set up a partial H-1B blockade. The denial rate for the already short supply of the visas reached 24 percent in fiscal year 2018. It fell back to 2 percent in fiscal year 2022 after courts found his administration’s handling of these visas to be unlawful.

Cutting off the flow of foreign workers by rejecting H-1B applications can negatively impact local economies and even hurt U.S. workers. In one 2014 study, researchers looking at this issue found that cities across the nation with high H-1B denial rates experienced a drop in computer-related jobs, and this decline was accompanied by lower wage growth for native-born citizens who lived there.

The U.S. remains a prime destination for foreign-born students and professionals, but the status quo may not hold. Talent-recruitment programs began to emerge in many countries in the 2010s. One prime example is Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy, which afforded three-year work permits to as many as 10,000 people in the U.S. who have H-1B visas.

The ultimate fix for the U.S.’s chronically broken immigration system would be to implement a long-sought massive overhaul through congressional legislation. Such comprehensive immigration reform would rationalize the competing demands of border security and the need to equitably regulate both legal and illegal immigration. But this kind of all-encompassing measure has little chance of being adopted during the next four years.

In bringing wider attention to the role of legal immigration, the wrangling over H-1Bs may have an upside. On a podcast last year, Trump remarked that international college students, once they graduate, should be eligible for green cards, which confer permanent residency. His administration could make good on some variation of this idea.

Other steps might raise the caps on H-1B visas granted annually (currently 85,000 in total) and institute much needed reforms to the visa program—especially to ensure that visa holders are not exploited. Employers could do their part by seeking out underutilized programs such as the 0-1A temporary work visa for individuals with “extraordinary ability.”

If nothing is done on H-1Bs and other legal-immigration measures, the desirability of the U.S. as a destination for STEM students and tech workers will fade. The 2024 NAS report notes that between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. fell from first to eighth worldwide in scores for attractiveness to highly educated workers. It will probably slip further.

The anti-immigrant atmosphere ushered in by the Trump administration’s promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is also likely to sour foreign students and engineers on coming to the U.S. And this outcome will benefit no one.