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The Dartmouth
February 28, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Professors discuss potential implications of H-1B visa changes

Changes to the visa program could restrict the College’s hiring of foreign faculty.

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As H-1B visas — high-skilled foreign worker permits — have morphed in recent weeks into a hot-button political issue, College officials have begun assessing the impact a federal policy change could have on the hiring of foreign faculty.

Current federal regulations allow for higher education institutions across the country to sponsor between 12,000 and 12,500 H-1B recipients a year, according to the State Science and Technology Institute. If those rules were to change — such as reducing the number of higher education H-1B visas granted — the carve-outs could too, making it more of a challenge for Dartmouth and peer institutions to hire from overseas, Tuck School of Business Dean Matthew Slaughter wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.

“Dartmouth would face new risk and uncertainty about desired hires, like U.S. companies currently do,” Slaughter wrote. “New regulations that restrict how higher education hires foreign-born faculty and staff would restrict the dynamism that these colleagues bring to schools like Dartmouth.”

At its core, the H-1B visa program allows U.S. companies to create jobs for highly educated foreigners, Slaughter explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Jan. 6. In the private sector, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services grants 65,000 new H-1B visas annually, with an additional 20,000 per year allocated to foreigners with a master’s degree or higher, according to the USCIS. 

A policy change would have implications beyond college campuses. Economics professor Bruce Sacerdote wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that amending the H-1B program would also negatively affect the economy in general. 

“These workers enhance our productivity [and] lead to firm growth and increases in GDP and … tax revenues, too,” Sacerdote wrote. “Most studies of immigration find that foreign-born workers are complements, not substitutes, for U.S.-born workers.”

Sacerdote explained that workers on H-1B visas also have the potential to create job growth.

“If an H-1B worker is running a lab, that lab has spillovers to other scientists or engineers and all of the people that are employed by the lab,” he wrote. “It works the same way in other industries like financial services, housing and medicine.”

Economics professor Ethan Lewis agreed, adding that the “latest research suggests” that the H-1B visa program does not “take jobs from natives” — a common argument against the program — but rather “increases the wages of most workers.”

“Symmetrically imposing new restrictions is likely to reduce the number of new tech jobs available to Americans, in part because firms seem to outsource high tech jobs to foreign countries when they are not able to hire H-1B workers,” Lewis said. 

However, Slaughter wrote that he does not yet know how the policy differences would manifest, as they would largely depend on the type of regulations put on the visa program.

“If a new regulation limited the total number of higher-education H-1B visas below the quantity typically granted in recent years, then some sort of lottery would likely be held, as is the case for companies right now,” Slaughter wrote. 

Sacerdote added that the H-1B visa has benefited economic drivers and national figures, including Elon Musk, who is a strong proponent of the program.

“Elon Musk …was on an H-1B himself and has created a lot of jobs and advancement of green technology,” Sacerdote wrote.

Slaughter wrote that public opinion surveys “consistently show that Americans of all political parties want more high-skilled immigration.” The benefits of “opening our doors to the world’s best and brightest” are demonstrated most “clearly” through sports, he added.  

“In the current 2024-2025 season, across all NBA teams, there are a record-tying 125 international players who hail from a record-tying 43 countries and six continents,” Slaughter wrote. While these athletes are not H-1B visa holders, Slaughter explained that it is an example of how “foreign-born talent enriches the overall American economy in much the same ways.”

Despite concerns over potential restrictions to the H-1B visa program, federal agencies are pending the implementation of a new rule into the program that will reform and modernize the H-1B approvals process, aimed at improving “its flexibility to better allow employers to retain talented workers and improving the integrity and oversight of the program,” according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Perhaps the single smartest thing we can do for the economy is to attract workers here so that we can all benefit from their productivity,” Sacerdote wrote. 

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science Elizabeth Smith and members of the Talent Acquisition team did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.


Tess Bruett

Tess Bruett is a ‘27 from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is studying History and hopes to eventually go to law school. In her free time she enjoys hiking, working out, and reading!