Don’t Repeal Universities’ Student-Visa Exemption

Republicans are turning to a new front in the immigration wars: foreign-worker visas. Late last month, the Trump administration announced plans to scrap the H-1B lottery—the federal government’s current process for awarding foreign-worker permits—and to replace it with a merit- and wage-based system. Meantime, Republicans in the House and Senate proposed bills to repeal a provision in federal law that allows universities to hire faculty and researchers from foreign countries without counting against the H-1B program’s visa cap.

While those bills reflect Republicans’ understandable suspicion that universities are using H-1B visas to bring progressive academics to America, their proposed solution could backfire. The right answer is not to cut the number of H-1B visas, but to ensure that they are awarded to talented foreigners who will love and respect the United States.

The H-1B program allows employers to bring highly skilled foreign workers to the U.S. on a special visa. Current law caps the number of visas at 65,000 annually, plus an extra 20,000 for foreign workers who have obtained a master’s degree or higher from an American institution. It also exempts universities from the cap, letting them hire foreign professors and researchers without counting against the annual quota.

Removing universities’ exemptions would be misguided. H-1B proponents believe that the problem is the number of visas, but the real issue is that the U.S. lacks a robust system for screening potential visa-holders’ ideology.

To get a sense of the types of people considered for H-1B higher education visas, I reviewed more than 15,000 applications that universities filed on foreigners’ behalf from the second quarter of FY2025. The most common fields for proposed visa holders included education and training (38.6 percent); life, physical, and social sciences (28.3 percent); “healthcare and technical” (9.5 percent); and engineering and architecture (5.4 percent). These four areas collectively accounted for 81.8 percent of all entries.

To apply for an H-1B higher education visa, a university requests a certified Labor Condition Application from the government, in which it promises to pay applicants above a certain amount. If the application is approved, the employer files another form demonstrating that the proposed role constitutes a specialty occupation—normally requiring at least a bachelor’s in a specific field—and that the employer-employee relationship and worksite details satisfy H-1B rules.

Table 1: Manhattan Institute’s Analysis of FY2025 Q2 Higher Education H-1B Applications

Category	Count	Percentage
Education, Training & Library	5840	38.58%
Life, Physical & Social Sciences	4287	28.32%
Healthcare Practitioners & Technical	1434	9.47%
Engineering & Architecture	817	5.40%
Mathematics, Statistics & Data	797	5.26%
Computer & Information Technology	785	5.19%
Environment, Agriculture & Natural Resources	516	3.41%
Accounting, Finance & Economics	171	1.13%
Business, Management & Human Resources	118	0.78%
Social Services, Counseling & Community	118	0.78%
Sports, Recreation & Fitness	100	0.66%
Marketing, Communications & Public Relations	80	0.53%
Arts, Design, Media & Entertainment	58	0.38%
Operations, Logistics & Supply Chain	14	0.09%
Legal & Law	4	0.03%

While many of these proposed visa holders would have worked in STEM fields, some would have worked in the social sciences—disciplines that tend to lean left and produce activist scholarship. It’s possible that these potential visa holders, were they accepted, could have used their positions to undermine American civic norms. Such concerns prompted the Trump administration to open an investigation into Harvard’s visa programs to ensure that they were not undermining America’s “national security interests.”

The way to ensure that universities don’t abuse the H-1B program is rigorously to screen prospective student visa-holders for ideological extremism—something we have done with other immigrants for decades. The Nationality Act of 1952, for example, included provisions excluding aliens affiliated with the Communist Party or who advocated “the doctrines of world communism,” which the Supreme Court upheld in 1972’s Kleindienst v. Mandel. Congress loosened the ideological restrictions on prospective immigrants in 1990 but retained the ban on Communist Party membership.

We should apply similar provisions to H-1B student-visa candidates today. Congress should add a civics screening for all H-1B applicants and review applicants’ social media posts for red flags. It should also require every prospective student-visa holder to include a “line of research” note, which should rule out any person intending to come to the U.S. to perform research contrary to national interests.

This would be a better policy than reducing the number of H-1B visa holders outright. For one, many of those foreign workers are patriotic. Seventy-five percent of naturalized immigrants said they were very proud to be American, compared with 69 percent of natives. Immigrant citizens (79 percent) were also more likely than natives (73 percent) to believe that the United States is better than most other countries.

Additionally, reducing the number of student visas could undermine America’s academic might. Immigrants have won roughly 40 percent of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in physics, chemistry, and medicine since 2000. In 2019–20, 57 percent of STEM Ph.D. graduates at U.S. universities were international students. Over two-thirds of graduate students in artificial intelligence are foreign nationals.

These individuals often become our innovators. If they are kept out of the country, they will become our competitors. Immigrants have founded or co-founded nearly two-thirds of America’s top AI companies and over 55 percent of our billion-dollar startups. Many of those founders first came here as international students or scholars.

The university visa exemption, in effect, has fostered a massive brain gain, enabling American academia (and by extension, industry) to recruit the best and brightest globally without bureaucratic hurdles. In today’s global talent race, closing our doors isn’t a winning strategy. But neither is flinging them open. The sweet spot is a policy that channels the flow of high-skilled immigrants in line with our economic needs and civic values.

Photo by Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Getty Images