The debate over immigration reached a fever pitch the past few weeks, with Elon Musk and other members of the incoming Trump administration arguing in favor of increasing legal immigration via the H-1B visa program, and numerous opponents from both the right and left arguing against them. 

Here’s an open secret—Michigan’s universities are the single biggest H-1B employer in the state, hiring more foreign employees each year than anyone else.

What exactly is an H-1B visa? It’s a work visa, essentially. A permit for foreign nationals to reside in the USA and work for an American company. The companies that hire them sponsor the visa application, and the employee’s residency is contingent on their employment. 

The University of Michigan filed 640 H-1B visa applications last year. Michigan State University filed 231. Combined that puts them at the top of the list, with over 200 more foreign hires than Ford, which topped the list for private industry at 640. 

Everyone who’s been to college the last few decades, particularly at the large university systems, is familiar with foreign professors. Some of them are brilliant researchers, leaders in their field, speaking impeccable English, no doubt. Others are impossible to decipher across the crowded lecture halls, strongly accented, personally abrasive. People are people at the end of the day, but that’s beside the point.

Many in academia believe that hiring the best professors, scientists, and researchers, regardless of national origin, makes sense. If the goal of academia is the pursuit of knowledge, the rigorous study and advancement of each field, then of course the premier universities must seek out the best talent no matter what. 

Things are never this simple, though. There are many issues with this approach, though few within academia acknowledge them. Perhaps the most serious is spying and research theft, particularly in areas of critical national security and defense research. Numerous Chinese nationals in particular have been caught sending information back to China over the years. 

One Harvard professor, a leading nanotech researcher, was convicted of working with a secretive Chinese People’s Liberation Army program. Two Chinese nationals, uncovered as active duty PLA officers, were indicted along with him, charged with smuggling research back to China. 

A serving officer in China’s Ministry of State Security was convicted of espionage, attempting to steal designs to GE’s jet engines. He worked along with a Chinese student studying in the U.S., who even enlisted in the U.S. Army as a spy. 

Hell, even the foreign undergrads on J-1 Visas get caught spying from time to time. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider that foreign faculty, with even more to gain, might do the same. Particularly those from nations with aspirations to rival the U.S. 

This is the sort of observation that, in previous decades, might have been common sense: How many Soviet scientists did American colleges hire for their engineering programs at the height of the Cold War? Not many. Meanwhile, there are, without a doubt, secret officers in the People’s Liberation Army studying, researching, and working at American Universities.

Second, we must consider the long-term ramifications of advancement within our institutional pipelines. Academia in particular remains, as it was in the beginning, a medieval hierarchy. Students advance within the system, competing to move up the hierarchy, as do professors. 

If you look across the board, every aspect of American academia is totally open to international competition, from undergraduate admissions to graduate program admissions, and especially faculty hiring. 

The more foreign undergrads, grad students, and professors brought into the system, the steeper the competition for domestic academics. Fewer are able to access the institutional resources and funding that might, in the end, have provided for significant research and long careers. 

Increased foreign competition has the paradoxical effect of stifling the development of domestic talent that might otherwise be allowed to flourish in our institutions. How many Michiganders get shut out of U-M for out-of-state and international students paying higher tuition rates?

Faculty hiring in the humanities in particular has become cutthroat in recent years, with far fewer openings than there are PhD graduates. I personally was strongly advised, even 10 years ago, not to pursue humanities research, because there was simply so small a chance of landing a job. 

Opening up competition internationally makes this even more absurd. I saw this play out later in my career, after I landed a brief stint on the faculty of a small college. 

Our department only had a few full-time faculty, one of whom was an expensive foreign hire on an H-1B visa. The highest salary in the department was for this assistant professor, who had two offices in the building, thousands in additional grant funding, and even free college-owned housing near campus. 

Hired for the position, of course, over our brilliant studio tech, who had a degree from an equally impressive school, research record, and tons of impressive connections in the field. 

His mistake? He was an American man and ambitious about making changes within an increasingly stagnant department. He was there, he knew the job, and he was loyal. He would have stayed for a long career and been the sort of professor students still talked about years later. 

Instead, the hiring committee threw a ton of money at a flashy foreign applicant who, surprise surprise, bailed a few years later and left for a better offer elsewhere. That hire had no interest in staying in Michigan for life.

Look, this is just one anecdote. But I guarantee you, looking across Michigan higher education, this story has played out hundreds of times. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown,” sayeth the Lord, and boy does this hold true for academia. 

Exoticism carries weight beyond objective notions of research value or ability. Familiarity breeds contempt. Domestic academics have been increasingly shut out of institutional advancement, and this has generational effects.

Here’s the even greater irony. When you look down the list of H-1B hires at Michigan’s finest universities, sure, the lion’s share are faculty, post-docs, researchers. Yet maybe half have nothing to do with research, the “academia” part. Software developers, app programmers, business analysts, dozens of functionaries fill the rolls.

Are we really expected to believe U-M can’t fill a Marketing Communications Specialist position with an American applicant? It can’t find a Business Systems Analyst from its own prestigious Ross School of Business? It can’t find an Art Program Director from Michigan? 

This is, in a way, even more insulting, because it shatters the thin veneer of academic meritocracy, the supposed rationale for hiring so many foreign faculty. 

It speaks instead to the true ideals of the American university system, which are not American at all. Each campus is an island of cosmopolitan internationalism, floating regrettably in a sea of Americans, who the ivory-tower elites largely despise. 

It’s not quite the same as the tech companies, who use the H-1B program to hire cheaper foreign employees, willing to work for less. Universities actually have a profound ideological commitment to internationalism. Every aspect of the university must be opened to the entire world.

One wonders what might happen if the flow of federal money stopped, if the American government stopped using domestic students as a pass-through entity to funnel trillions in student-loan money to these institutions. Perhaps even the threat of this might force a change. 

It’s simple, really. If academia wants American money, it needs to start supporting Americans. End of discussion.

Bobby Mars is an artist, alter ego, and former art professor. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.