The Trump administration announced on Friday that as of yesterday, new applications for H-1B visas will only be accepted if accompanied by a $100,000 payment.
H-1B visas allow employers to legally hire foreign workers with specialized skills or knowledge to work in the US.
For US universities to hire academics from other countries, they typically must sponsor their visas. The new fee is in addition to any other payments and fees involved in the visa application process, and the policy does not exempt universities, and so now it will cost schools an additional $100,000 to hire foreign scholars.
There remain some uncertainties about the new program, including whether it will be challenged in court, and whether it will be extended beyond its initial year of implementation.
After it was first announced, some universities urged employees with H-1B status who were not in the US to return by midnight on this past Saturday, and issued warnings about travel. Carnegie Mellon University, for example, published a statement saying: “Individuals currently in the United States on an H-1B visa are advised to postpone any plans for international travel. Until the implications and applicability of this new executive order are more fully understood, traveling abroad could pose a significant risk.”
The costs the new policy imposes on universities is likely to affect the US academic job market, and perhaps downstream from that, demand from foreign students for spots in US PhD programs. Discussion welcome.
America First!
If this is meant to be funny, it’s not; if it is meant to be satirical, it’s not; if anything else, well….
Self-deprecating, I’d say that’s a kind of humor, British primarily, and perhaps also satirical. But well, we don’t have to agree, evidently.
You have to see the absurdity of all of these things, and I am not sure taking them deadly serious solves anything.
By ‘all of these things’ I mean the entire American immigration system (and perhaps any other immigration system), not just now in Trump times, but also before. I understand that people are affected and the need to find solutions, but at least just sometimes, I can’t do anything else but laugh in the face of the kafkaesque turn of American (world) politics.
So, no, I don’t understand why my reaction is so much out of place here.
My apologies! I understand it now with the explanation. I feel like comments like this in the public sphere no longer strike me (international&non-white) as they would before. Even 5 months ago I would probably have taken it the way you intended.
if this sticks it is important to note that it won’t just affect faculty (and potential faculty) and downstream PhD students. It is reasonable to be focused on the academic side of things (we are academics!) but lots of international students at US institutions at the undergrad and MA level are doing so in part for a shot at these visas post graduation, so it will affect international enrollments and the financial health of many of our universities (I mean, beyond what would inevitably have been a drop in international applicants this year anyway).
It is worth noting that the president does not have authority to establish arbitrary fees for H1-B visas via proclamation, and universities and corporations (not to mention blog posts like yours) should not concede the legality of the fees in advance, and should jointly fight this policy in the courts, rather than debate whether to pay them or abandon their international hiring plans.
I was about to say the same thing: the fees here appear to be flagrantly illegal and that ought to be the starting point of any conversation.
(Also, for connoisseurs of the DN comment thread: good heavens, something Lewis Powell and I actually agree on.)
Well, in the current administration, there is always the question of to what extent what is clearly illegal determines what the facts on the ground are. The tariffs are clearly illegal, but they’re still being imposed; hopefully the Supreme Court will throw them out, but until then, as far as businesses and prices are concerned, the tariffs are very much in place. The military strikes against the Venezuelan boats are clearly illegal; but tell that to those who were killed in those strikes.
I would imagine for the H1B fees to be effectively cut down by the courts, one would need a spate of district and circuit judgements, in favor of individual plaintiffs or certified classes (post CASA, there can be no universal injunction against this, short of a SCOTUS judgment), and eventually the SCOTUS will have to weigh in. Until then, there might not necessarily be much relief forthcoming.
The most optimistic scenario, at least for universities, is that a large group of universities get certified as a class and a district court grants them immediate relief from the fees, and no higher court stays that relief, and eventually SCOTUS rules against these fees. But I don’t know if I can convince myself to be quite so optimistic.
There is some complication to this. Fees on visas are supposed to be set via a rule-making process that clearly hasn’t been followed here. But, this “fee” isn’t being put forward as a visa fee. It’s being put forward under the president’s authority under INA s 212f & s215a. 212f allows the president to “suspend the entry” of certain aliens in certain circumstances. This is the authority that US Supreme Court upheld in “Muslim travel ban” cases in the first Trump administration. That was, to my mind, a strained reading of the power in 212f. This is…an even more unusual reading of the power. It is certainly without precedent. But so far the Supreme Court (or, the Republicans on it, at least) has not been very interested in limiting presidential power, when used by Trump, even when it’s been used in aggressive and novel ways. I think this should be found to be illegal, but I’d hate to bet much on that outcome.
Any idea if universities can get around this be using the J-1 Professor Visa or O-1 Visa?
I don’t think J-1 is a professor visa – it’s primarily used for postdocs & visiting positions, and is technically a a non-immigrant visa (similar to F-1), unlike H-1b, which is dual purpose (so can be immigrant and non-immigrant). So basically, if you recruit someone on J-1 for a tenure-track job, the person will have to say (essentially, lie) during the interview process that they intend to return to their country after a certain amount of years to do not mean to apply for green card and remain in the US, etc, which is just ridiculous. As for O-1, the vast majority of junior candidates just won’t qualify, I feel like (if you qualify for O-1, you might as well just apply for EB-1 Green card, which you can do anywhere in the world).
Yes, but there are some caveats.
J-1 is likely to come with home country residence requirement which needs to be waived or fulfilled before you can apply for green card;
O-1 is a bit more complicated to get, and there are other caveats that I won’t go into here. But caveats aside, this is a good way to get around H1B.
Perhaps, but in my experience J-1 has some disadvantages over the H1B (it is not supposed to lead to a green card; the interview process is different/harder/you need to be out of the country for it).
H1B could be tricky even back in the day (I was at a very small college that didn’t want to pay a lawyer and they messed it up several times so I couldn’t travel for years). But this will be absolutely outrageous, if it does come into effect.
J-1 often comes with home country residence requirements, which needs to be either *waived* or *fulfilled* before you can apply for green card or H1B or a new J1. Both can be difficult. Not a good option.
O-1 visa is feasible. It is dual-intentional, but less so than H1B, and therefore a less standard way to transition to green card. (This subtlety is not well-understood.) However, it is more difficult to get, and needs to be renewed more often, and comes with unfavorable conditions for citizens of some countries.
I think it’s worth noting that, at least as of yesterday, it wasn’t 100% clear if this policy would apply to universities. It’s also far from clear that it would not. This is because, like so many Trump administration policies, it’s written in a way that indicates very little familiarity with the relevant law (or policy, for that matter) and without the sort of care one would normally find in relation to major policy changes. The “Proclamation” talks only about tech workers, and makes reference to the H1-B lottery. The H1-Bs used by academics are not part of that system. This suggests that this might not apply to academics (and some others). But other statements are broad and seem to apply to H1-Bs generally. The following memos and “clarifying tweets” (?!?) have been less than fully consistent, and make more, rather than less, confusion. It’s clear that whoever wrote the “proclamation” (it clearly wasn’t written by Trump himself) did not really understand the law here. So, at least as of yesterday (when I despaired of further reading “clarifications” and lawyers who work in the area trying, and failing, to make sense of them) it wasn’t yet 100% clear this would apply to universities. Of course, it’s still crazy even if it doesn’t, and the uncertainty itself is a very major problem.
The administration is making policy in an unclear, confusing way? Surely not.
Hard to judge the best response to this policy for universities.
On the one hand the administration pretty clearly didn’t have them in mind when making these statements, and for the reasons outlined above universities could justifiably assume this doesn’t apply to them and proceed on this basis without antagonising the administration – as mounting or joining any sort of legal challenge will obviously immediately cause Trump and his goons to target academia directly and deliberately.
On the other hand the uncertainty is itself very damaging, and there will be an indirect impact even if the policy is only focused on tech firms etc, and there is also a civic duty to challenge such overreach and shambolic tyranny.
O tempora o mores
Another perhaps more apposite question is whether US universities will acquiesce to what the Trump administration demands about unrelated issues in exchange for not having to pay a $100,000 for H-1B visas. For instance, if a professor says something not nice about Charlie Kirk, will the university find an excuse to fire them? And so on, for everything the Trump administration might want a university to do.
You want foreign talent? Just hire Canadians or Mexicans who have access to TN Visas! Especially us Canadians, were practically part of the union now, right? 51st state and all.
More seriously, I would just assume that this will depress hiring of foreign faculty. Many hiring committees I’ve encountered simply assume that it is harder to hire foreign talent, even when it’s not the case, disinclining them to hire foreingers. Combined with prestiege bias and a general preference for American applicants, foreign talent rarely has a chance unless they are a DEI target or are already an established superstar.
Or they were trained in the US, which now will also be more difficult, I gather.