Trump's crackdown on foreign students threatens to disrupt pipeline of inventors

Mint

a day ago

Ajay Bhatt had never been on a plane when he left India for City University of New York to pursue a graduate degree in 1981. More than four decades and 130 patents later, billions of people are still using Bhatt's most-recognizable invention, the Universal Serial Bus, or USB.
'My dad really didn't want me to go," Bhatt recalls. But, he said, 'This was the country where you could get the very best education, and everybody was welcoming."
High-skilled immigration has long been part of the secret sauce that gave the U.S. the world's most dynamic economy. Studies show newcomers punch well above their weight in innovative output and entrepreneurship. They authored 23% of U.S. patents from 1990 to 2016, according to a 2022 study by Shai Bernstein of Harvard Business School and four co-authors. They founded or co-founded more than half of America's billion-dollar startups, according to another study. Immigrants co-founded or played a major early role in Nvidia, Alphabet and Tesla.
From Elon Musk to lesser-known figures such as Bhatt, many of these inventors and founders originally came to the U.S. on student visas. President Trump's policies could disrupt that pipeline.
In May, the Trump administration paused interviews with student-visa candidates to vet their social-media activity and said it would begin to 'aggressively revoke" the visas of Chinese students at U.S. universities. It also sought to block Harvard University from enrolling foreign students; that order has been stayed by a federal judge.
'We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools," Trump said last month. 'They can't get in because we have foreign students there. But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country."
The U.S. hosted more than 1.1 million international college students in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education. In fiscal 2024, the government approved 263,000 applications by foreign graduates for temporary employment under the Optional Practical Training program, or OPT, and 52,000 onetime students or dependents rotated into H-1B work visas, which can lead to citizenship.
Trump's nominee for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director, Joseph Edlow, said in a confirmation hearing May 21 that he would like to develop regulations 'that would allow us to remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school." F-1 is the main visa used by students.
'For too long, woke, so-called 'elite' institutions like Harvard have admitted inordinate numbers of foreign students and allowed antisemitic violence to ravage their campuses—hindering Jewish students' education, prompting concerns of espionage, and threatening U.S. national security," a White House spokeswoman said. 'Ensuring that guests in our country want to learn and contribute positively to our educational environment, rather than undermine Americans' safety, is critical to a strong U.S. economy."
The changes outlined by Edlow would effectively kill the OPT program, said Stuart Anderson, who now runs the National Foundation for American Policy, which supports high-skilled immigration. That would make it impossible for many foreigners to start U.S. businesses after they graduate and significantly dim the allure of American universities for international students, he said.
In a 2022 study, Anderson found that immigrants founded or co-founded 319 of 582 U.S. startup companies that had achieved valuations of $1 billion or more, including Stripe, Instacart and Epic Games. Nearly half of those had been founded by immigrants who attended U.S. universities as international students, the study said. Instagram was co-founded by a Brazilian, Mike Krieger, who studied at Stanford University.
'It's not that surprising that a lot of international students end up starting a business, because risk-taking is obviously in their makeup," Anderson said. 'They're willing to take a chance and travel a long way to study in another country. It's an entrepreneurial thing to do."
Gleb Yushin, a materials scientist who was born in the Soviet Union, considered schools in a handful of other countries—Germany, Japan, the U.K.—before deciding to get his Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. 'In Europe, there was an invisible ceiling…that would prevent immigrants from reaching their full potential," said Yushin, who came to the U.S. in 1999 on an F-1 visa, like Bhatt.
The company he co-founded, Sila Nanotechnologies, has raised more than $1.3 billion from investors, employs roughly 400—mostly in Alameda, Calif., and Moses Lake, Wash.—and developed groundbreaking technology for improving batteries, Yushin said.
Whether the world's best and brightest will continue flocking to American universities is an open question.
Angelika Fretzen came from Germany to do postdoctoral research at Harvard University 1998. She joined a biotech startup alongside four other post-docs and spearheaded the development of Linzess, now a leading drug for irritable bowel syndrome. The company grew to employ as many as 500 people, plus hundreds more at manufacturers, suppliers, labs and partner firms across the country.
As is often the case, the early days of Fretzen's career were hard, marked by routine failed experiments. Boston's community of scientists, many foreign, repeatedly helped her get back on the horse.
'If I had faced the kind of adversity that I think some of our young students here are facing right now," Fretzen says, 'I would have probably gone back to Germany and done the regular career in some pharmaceutical company."
Trump recently suggested that foreign students at Harvard might be 'troublemakers" and that the school should cap international enrollment at lower levels. In a May 29 interview with Newsmax, Vice President JD Vance dismissed concerns about the effect on U.S. technological prowess of fewer foreign students.
'This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that," Vance said. A crackdown on foreign student visas and related abuse is 'an opportunity for American citizens to really flourish."
Bhatt got the idea for the USB in 1991 after watching his wife and daughter struggle with a printer. At the time, external devices such as printers and keyboards came with unique cables that plugged into specific ports on a computer, some of them similar in appearance and compatible with only certain brands. The jumble of wires made personal computers daunting for non-geeks to use.
Bhatt's supervisor at Intel, where he had recently started working, was skeptical of the USB but gave him time to work on it. A year and a half later, the company's management was convinced, and Bhatt began building a consortium of manufacturers, including Microsoft, International Business Machines, HP and eventually Apple, to agree to a universal standard.
'I owe all my success to the opportunities that were given to me in the U.S.," says Bhatt, who is now retired.
For his scientific achievements, Bhatt in May was awarded India's equivalent to the Presidential Medal of Freedom. On a visit to his home country to receive the honor, he was struck by the number of parents who now want to send their college-age children to study in Britain, Canada, Australia or Singapore instead of the U.S.
Bhatt doubts he would have been able to convince his own father to let him come to the U.S. in the current environment.
'I don't think he would have allowed me," he said.
Write to Paul Kiernan at [e-mail]