Researchers in academia often relocate during their scientific training and even into their professional careers. This sometimes includes moving across countries to acquire or provide specialized skills for a niche topic. In the US, these highly skilled workers come to the country under an H-1B visa, a program designed for recruiting employees in specialized fields.
“These visas are like the lifeblood for many universities because they cannot fill many researcher or doctor positions without these academic H-1B visas,” said Ramya Kumar, a polymer scientist at the Colorado School of Mines. Kumar completed her postdoctoral training and started her career under an H-1B visa.
In September 2025, though, the Trump administration increased the application fee for these visas to $100,000, more than ten-fold the original cost. For academic research institutions, this effectively served as a de facto pause on recruiting new faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and other professionals who would normally need this visa. Yet earlier this year, Texas and Florida signed legislation to prohibit certain institutions from hiring an individual under an H-1B visa for one year. Some members of Congress have also proposed eliminating the H-1B program altogether.
Amidst other challenges in academic research over the last year, Kumar and researchers from universities in the impacted states said that reducing the recruitment of international talent will only hurt institutions and scientific progress.
H-1B Visa Restrictions May Miss Key Sources of Misuse
One of the arguments made in the Trump administration’s executive order for increasing the cost of the H-1B visa is that employers are exploiting this process to replace American workers with “lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” It also alleged widespread abuse of the H-1B visa program.
On January 27, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a freeze on H-1B visa applications for state-funded positions that would last until the end of the 2027 legislative session. Florida’s Board of Governors followed with a similar freeze on March 2, 2026 that restricted new applications for these visas at public universities. Both state entities echoed the claims in the executive order.
A researcher at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center who requested to remain anonymous disagreed with this claim. “The H-1B system is self-policing,” they said, highlighting how the visa process is lengthier and, even prior to the increased fee, more expensive than hiring a domestic candidate. “If the expertise were available in the US, that would be by far the more preferable option as somebody looking to recruit a person.”
As a former H-1B visa recipient, the researcher added that part of the H-1B paperwork included protections to make sure that the salary for the international employee offered by the university was comparable to what a domestic candidate would be paid. “So that argument doesn't really hold water either,” they said.
Legitimate examples of fraud and abuse do exist within the H-1B program. One technology company that recruited individuals on H-1B visas exploited a loophole that allowed them to underpay these employees when they subcontracted their work to other business, including the University of California, San Francisco. To date, though, the majority of H-1B visa fraudulent activity, such as submitting forged documents, comes from the private sector, especially consulting, contracting, and information technology firms. State-level freezes on H-1B visa applications at state agencies and public universities are unlikely to address fraud occurring in the private sector.
New H-1B Policies Have Immediate Impacts on University Hiring
While these state-level actions only just went into effect, researchers are already feeling their impact. Kumar said that, although these laws reduce career opportunities for scientists who need H-1B visas, “It's actually a loss for those states because you're losing talented researchers, [and] you're losing talented doctors or nurses.”
Indeed, the Texas-based researcher explained that the increased visa application fee already complicated hiring for a new faculty member with specific skill sets from outside of the country; now with the complete stop for new H-1B visas, recruiting that person is almost certainly impossible, the researcher said. They added that the legislation also complicates keeping scientists who came in on different visas and had hoped to transfer to the H-1B visa. “You’re seeing in real time, I guess, this squandering of talent,” the researcher said. “These rulings being put in place don't seem to give much regard to retaining the research infrastructure in Texas.”
A researcher at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation and Technology said that the new restriction on all H-1B visas expands ongoing limitations on international hires. In 2021, Florida implemented legislation that required additional screening for candidates coming from seven “countries of concern”, limiting the numbers of graduate and undergraduate students as well as research staff that could be recruited. This expanded to a full restriction on hiring or recruiting anyone coming from these countries in 2023.
Although this law is undergoing appeals, the researcher, who requested to remain anonymous, said that these previous restrictions already hurt recruitment at their institution. “Anytime you reduce the talent pool or reduce the pool of potential researchers, you reduce your scientific capability,” they said.
Many applicants to the university came from China, which was included on the list of banned nations, and the researcher said that it did not appear that more students were accepted from other countries, so the pool of recruits to join labs was smaller. The restrictions also cut off a pipeline of people coming for research experiences on paid fellowships, further decreasing the number of scientists at the institution.
Now, the Florida researcher said, “Not having H-1Bs at all will be devastating because about one third to half the lab has always been international, either at the student or the postdoc level.”
Restricting International Researchers Risks the Future of Science Progress
Diversity in science promotes the exchange of ideas that lead to breakthroughs. Cutting off access to international talent, the researchers agreed, will result in less scientific output. Additionally, foreign-born skilled workers are vital to the US’s continued presence in STEM research and development; international STEM professionals made up almost 22 percent of the STEM workforce in 2023.
However, Kumar agreed that while international scholars are important for filling roles in certain fields, creating a pipeline of domestic talent is also important. Yet she pointed out that the administration has actually cut funding to many domestic programs, such as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. “You're just going to lose a generation of scientists if you can't train either domestic or international trainees,” she said.
The researcher in Florida agreed, saying that despite the state’s restrictions on international hiring, they have not seen a commensurate increase in domestic applications. Now, as a result of the pause on H-1B visas that will further limit the available pool of talented researchers, they said, “Certainly the science quality will go down. The ability to do the science will go down just because we won't have the talent pool or the people to do it. And so, if it continues, [the effects] will not be great.”
They said that because of the increased cost and, in Florida and Texas, the states’ pause on hiring people on H-1B visas, more researchers may join institutions on a shorter visa, such as a J-1. Because of the reduced timeframe of this visa, they surmised it could lead to these researchers developing shorter projects or principal investigators needing to have multiple people cycle through on J-1 and similar visas to complete the work. The researcher at Texas pointed out that, in the long-term, these restrictions could reduce the overall expertise available to research groups if international domain experts can’t join US institutions, delaying science progress.
In March, House representatives introduced a measure to exempt healthcare workers from the increased fee set by the federal administration. However, at this time, there is no similar legislation for biomedical research aside from making individual exemption requests through the Department of Homeland Security.
H-1B and International Program Changes Will Have Lasting Impacts on Research
Although the pauses on H-1B visa hires at Texas and Florida institutions are currently projected to lift in 2027, all of the researchers interviewed agreed that the damage has likely already been done. Kumar said that following interruptions in visa processing in 2025, her institution already saw a decrease in international graduate student enrollment. “They're going to places where they feel like maybe they'd be having a more welcoming environment,” she surmised.
The Texas-based researcher agreed, saying that even if the pauses lift and the application fees are reversed, international researchers may still hesitate to come to the US because of the uncertainty about their future. “I think [the damage] will take a long time to reverse,” they said.
The researcher added that they have heard colleagues talking more seriously about relocating out of the state or possibly out of the country. While they acknowledged some of this came up as a result of funding challenges, they said that the state’s recent actions, including changes to the structure of faculty senates that normally provide advice and vote on university decisions, raised concerns about government overreach into the independence of academic institutions. “It's just a crying shame that somewhere that is such a leader in research and has really invested so much [in research] and recognized the value could be, as I say, eroding that at just a terrifying pace,” they said.
