Respondents from both academia and the private sector told us they’re aware of the high stakes of speaking out.
“As an academic, we have to be very careful about how we voice our personal opinion because it will impact the entire university if there is retaliation,” one engineering professor told us.
“I don’t want to be a target,” said one cleantech entrepreneur, who worries not only about reprisals from the current administration but also about potential blowback from Democrats if he cooperates with it.
“I’m not a Trumper!” he said. “I’m just trying not to get fined by the EPA.”
The people: “The adversarial attitude against immigrants … is posing a brain drain”
Immigrants are crucial to American science, but what one respondent called a broad “persecution of immigrants,” and an increasing climate of racism and xenophobia, are matters of growing concern.
Some people we spoke with feel vulnerable, particularly those who are immigrants themselves. The Trump administration has revoked 6,000 international student visas (causing federal judges to intervene in some cases) and threatened to “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students in particular. In recent months, the Justice Department has prioritized efforts to denaturalize certain citizens, while similar efforts to revoke green cards granted decades ago were shut down by court order. One entrepreneur who holds a green card told us, “I find myself definitely being more cognizant of what I’m saying in public and certainly try to stay away from anything political as a result of what’s going on, not just in science but in the rest of the administration’s policies.”
On top of all this, federal immigration raids and other enforcement actions—authorities have turned away foreign academics upon arrival to the US and detained others with valid academic visas, sometimes because of their support for Palestine—have created a broad climate of fear.
Four respondents said they were worried about their own immigration status, while 16 expressed concerns about their ability to attract or retain talent, including international students. More than a million international students studied in the US last year, with nearly half of those enrolling in graduate programs, according to the Institute of International Education.
“The adversarial attitude against immigrants, especially those from politically sensitive countries, is posing a brain drain,” an AI researcher at a large public university on the West Coast told us.
This attack on immigration in the US can be compounded by state-level restrictions. Texas and Florida both restrict international collaborations with and recruitment of scientists from countries including China, even though researchers told us that international collaborations could help mitigate the impacts of decreased domestic funding. “I cannot collaborate at this point because there’s too many restrictions and Texas also can limit us from visiting some countries,” the Texas academic said. “We cannot share results. We cannot visit other institutions … and we cannot give talks.”
All this is leading to more interest in positions outside the United States. One entrepreneur, whose business is multinational, said that their company has received a much higher share of applications from US-based candidates to openings in Europe than it did a year ago, despite the lower salaries offered there.
“It is becoming easier to hire good people in the UK,” confirmed Karen Sarkisyan, a synthetic biologist based in London.
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