H-1B visa debate highlights US reliance on foreign workforce for tech, science

A heated debate has recently erupted between two groups of supporters of President Donald Trump. The dispute concerns the H-1B visa system, the programme that allows US employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations – mostly in the tech industry.

On the one hand, there are people like Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who has called the H-1B program a “total and complete scam”. On the other, there are tech tycoons like Elon Musk who think skilled foreign workers are crucial to the US tech sector.

The H-1B visa programme is subject to an annual limit of new visas it can issue, which sits at 65,000 per fiscal year. There is also an additional annual quota of 20,000 H-1B visas for highly skilled international students who have a proven ability to succeed academically in the United States.

The H-1B programme is the primary vehicle for international graduate students at US universities to stay and work in the United States after graduation. At Rice University, where I work, much of STEM research is carried out by international graduate students. The same goes for most American research-intensive universities.

As a computer science professor – and an immigrant – who studies the interaction between computing and society, I believe the debate over H-1B overlooks some important questions: Why does the US rely so...

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