Instead of American tech firm hiring remote labor in our nations, why not invite skilled STEM experts to reside in the US, pay taxes and add to our talent pool?
American Colleges Prove the Worth of H-1B Visas
Foreign faculty have spurred innovation, won accolades and made the U.S. the envy of the world.
By Matthew J. Slaughter, WSJ
Jan. 6, 2025 5:22 pm ET
People arrive before the start of a naturalization ceremony at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Miami, Aug. 17, 2018. Photo: Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
The recent kerfuffle among President-elect Trump’s advisers over America’s H-1B visa program exposes a fundamental policy disagreement: Does high-talent immigration spark dynamism or steal opportunity? Evidence for the former comes from the industry I work in, which isn’t often seen as a paragon of dynamism: higher education.
An H-1B visa allows an organization to create a new job in the U.S. for a highly educated foreigner for at least three years. The H-1B program imposes an annual cap on the American private sector of 65,000 new visas, with 20,000 additional allowed for applicants with at least a master’s degree. But certain U.S. nonprofit employers—including colleges and universities—are classified as “cap exempt” and can file H-1B petitions at any time without limit.
For many years, educational services has been the industry with the second-most H-1B visa approvals—after professional, scientific and technical services. Education averages around 12,000 new and 12,500 continuing annual approvals. At the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where I serve as dean, nearly half of our tenure-track faculty were born outside America, and many of these colleagues are or were employed here on an H-1B visa.
This almost unlimited flow of skilled migrants stokes innovation that benefits all Americans far more than it curbs the opportunities for U.S.-born scholars.
Research isn’t a zero-sum endeavor: New ideas can be widely shared and lead to innovations. Foreign-born Tuck faculty have won global awards and acclaim for their scholarship. They have earned American patents. And they enrich the scholarship of all Tuck faculty through collaboration in our seminar rooms, at our lunch tables and on campus strolls.
Teaching similarly isn’t zero-sum. Foreign-born Tuck faculty have been selected by our students as the school’s best teachers. They have won similar accolades when visiting other schools. Exemplary teachers strengthen Tuck’s reputation and finances, which benefits all faculty and staff. And they bolster the pedagogical skills of all Tuck faculty through their embrace of new technologies like virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence.
I’m a Minnesota native. During my career I have competed against foreign-born scholars for jobs in America. Thirty-one years ago, my Ph.D. cohort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was half international, half U.S.-born. Today, many peer-school deans are immigrants. When I was on the rookie-professor job market, would I have had more and higher-paying options if the U.S. had barred its universities from hiring non-U.S. professors? Sure. But today would I be as good a researcher, teacher and dean if I had no foreign-born colleagues? No way. I would be less creative, less productive and ultimately lower paid.
The benefits of hiring foreign professors go far beyond us, their faculty colleagues. Our students have learned more in richer ways—and thus have better professional opportunities. American education’s quality of research and teaching has led us to outcompete other nations’ programs. In 2023, the U.S. exported $50.2 billion of educational services, a major contribution to America’s $276.8 billion trade surplus with the world that year in all services. Our schools draw talented students from abroad—who in turn benefit all Americans. Four of the U.S.-based “Magnificent Seven” technology companies were founded by or are currently led by immigrants who studied at American universities.
The global pre-eminence of U.S. universities in expanding the human frontiers of discovering, teaching and applying knowledge is indisputable. In the 2024 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, seven of the top 10 schools were American. A foundational ingredient to all this dynamism has been our country’s eagerness to welcome the world’s best and brightest to U.S. universities. Today immigrants are only about 15% of the American population, but over the past 20 years they made up 39% of the U.S.-resident Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics.
None of this is to deny that American higher education today has problems to fix. But its welcoming of global talent isn’t one of them. Likewise, while policymakers should be vigilant for any unfair effects the H-1B program has on U.S. workers, it’s important to recognize the dynamism skilled immigrants bring. Foreign-born talent, be they professors or rocket scientists, won’t stop innovating if America decides to keep more of them out. They would just stop innovating in the U.S.
Our loss—of new ideas, companies and jobs—would be the rest of the world’s gain.
Mr. Slaughter is dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He served as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2005-07.
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