Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced he’ll direct the Florida Board of Governors to “pull the plug” on H1-B visas in the state’s university system. Likening H1-B visas to “indentured servitude,” he bemoaned that Florida universities rely on “cheap labor” and bring in professors from countries around the globe to research and teach.
H1-B visas are issued for foreign-born individuals with “highly specialized knowledge.” H1-B holders have allowed companies like Amazon, Google and others to expand and ensure that top talent is available to U.S. companies.
As the governor noted, H1-B visas are also essential for driving research and bringing the best of the best to U.S. universities. Presumably, the governor thinks that restricting H1-Bs will help build Florida universities.
For someone who claims to want to grow Florida’s economy, this is the logical equivalent of setting your house on fire to keep warm.
This idea misunderstands two key things. First is the idea that every foreign worker “replaces” a domestic worker. This assumption relies on the thoroughly debunked idea that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed. But that’s just not true. As the economy grows, jobs grow too.
Second, the governor is assuming that there is no meaningful difference between a worker from the U.S. and a worker from Estonia.
While it’s true that some workers may be similar, if they are not the best suited for the job, they will lead to an inferior quality product. Imagine you ordered pizza, and it came with ketchup instead of pizza sauce. They are both tomato-based sauces, but the ketchup pizza is unlikely to win any awards.
So how does this relate to H1-B visas?
When firms in competitive industries — like universities — look to hire, they want the best person for the job, the one who will produce innovative research and provide the best teaching and training for students.
Limiting your search to a specific geographical region greatly reduces your ability to form a top-tier, highly competitive team. If the Tampa Bay Lightning were only allowed to recruit players from Florida, they wouldn’t have a very good team. Instead, they seek out the best players from around the world.
Universities do the same. Sure, anyone with a doctorate in astronomy can teach freshmen to identify constellations. But very few are qualified to research Martian cloud systems. There might only be a dozen of those specialists in the entire world.
So ask, do you want the best at Florida universities? Or the “best” from a foolishly small pool?
The key to America’s economic growth is research and development. Removing or barring top researchers from the country would transfer that talent (and the research and development) to other countries. Thanks to attacks on higher education, foreign faculty are already leaving the U.S., including two recent Nobel Prize winners.
But what about all those unemployed Americans with doctorates?
Roughly 3% of university faculty in the U.S. have H1-B status. The unemployment rate among those with doctorates is 1.2%, mostly people switching jobs or just entering the market. So, assuming we were able to place every unemployed faculty member with a Ph.D. into faculty positions, more than half the jobs currently held by faculty with H1-B visas would go unfilled.
Many H1-B workers eventually gain permanent resident status or citizenship. Roughly 20% of faculty in the U.S. are foreign-born, so we would not only see jobs going unfilled immediately, but we would also lose a major source of future permanent faculty.
If the governor’s goal is to make Florida universities worse, then this is a great policy. But, if the governor’s goal is to have our universities staffed by the best, by those who will help our students to flourish and push the frontiers of research, perhaps we should keep our global faculty and focus our educational ire on the state’s educational priorities, like our math and science scores.
Michael A. Coon and Abigail R. Hall are associate professors in the Economics department at the University of Tampa.
