H-1B and the Universities

Like most professors, I have a lot of colleagues from outside the United States. The talk about Trump putting a $100K fee on H-1B visas has focused on tech, but an enormous part of the impact is on universities, who are not going to be able to afford this. What does this mean? First, it means my own colleagues can’t leave the country to visit their families or attend conferences. The word coming down from my university at least is that anyone leaving the country for any reason would be subject to the $100,000 fee, even as their visa is still good. Second, while you might not care about how this impacts history departments, engineering and computing and many science departments are deeply reliant upon drawing International faculty. There simply is not the number of qualified engineers who will take college salaries to fill these positions. So yeah, we are definitely making America great again by not hiring people to train our engineers!

Now, the Trump administration is saying that this doesn’t apply to current visa holders. Shockingly, no one believes them! It’s almost as if they are dishonest actors on every issue and everyone knows this. And even if it doesn’t, what university has six figures laying around to hire more faculty? They don’t have enough money to hire enough faculty in any case, not with the fourth VP of student affairs needing to pull in $300K a year and all. But seriously, regardless of the current state of universities, this is just a complete shitshow. Typically, Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing campaign and the need of the techbros behind Trumpism don’t merge well and all sorts of people are stuck between.

It’s a great country.