Meeting U.S. Defense Science and Engineering Workforce Needs

Abstract

Recent years have seen growing recognition of the deep reliance of the U.S. national security innovation base on foreign national advanced degree holders in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This recognition has led to a number of executive and legislative branch efforts aimed at attracting and securing highly skilled foreign-born STEM advanced degree holders to the U.S., as a potential path forward for meeting the science and engineering workforce needs of the U.S. defense sector, and its associated innovation base. This paper describes the policy context for this shift, and highlights ongoing needs for improved data and research that we see as critical for informing evidence-based policy debates in the coming years.¹

Introduction

Over the past several decades, economic research has shed light on many aspects of the economics of immigration. Led by Chiswick (1978), economists have analyzed how the length of time in the U.S. – often referred to as assimilation – affects the earnings of migrants to the U.S. Building on Borjas (1987)’s classic application of the Roy model, economists have analyzed the role of self-selection in which individuals migrate across countries. Work by Card (1990) and others has sought to provide rigorous evidence on how immigrants affect the wages and employment of natives. Economists have also directly studied several immigration policies, such as the H-1B visa lottery (Doran et al., 2022; Mahajan et al., 2024). Many economists are drawn to work on the economics of immigration out of a desire to generate rigorous, policy-relevant evidence that can inform both policymakers and the public about how changes to immigration policies affect the number and characteristics of foreign nationals allowed to enter the U.S., and on the economic impacts of those changes.

To be clear, this past literature has generated a number of important facts and insights. However, in recent years the key policy efforts aimed at changing the number and characteristics of foreign nationals allowed to enter the U.S. have been raised not in the context of immigration policy discussions, but rather have been articulated by the national security community as potential pathways for meeting the science and engineering workforce needs of the U.S. defense sector. Unfortunately, most of the economists with relevant expertise – in the economics of immigration – seem to be largely unaware of these national security-related efforts, presumably in part because economists have generally played less of a role in national defense and national security policy discussions. As a result, economics research has largely failed to keep pace with producing the types of facts and evidence that are needed to lay the groundwork for informed policy decisions in this area. The goal of this paper is to provide some context for this recent set of executive and legislative branch efforts, and to highlight specific examples of topics where additional research by economists would be valuable for informing more evidence-based policy discussions in the coming years.

It would be remiss not to mention that while national defense and national security have long been core policy objectives for politicians across the political spectrum, the economics of defense and national security are topics that have generally been neglected by economists relative to the policy attention they receive. From a public finance perspective, national security can be conceived of as an investment in a public good designed to reduce the likelihood of large-scale societal losses. Congressional interest in national security as a policy objective can be illustrated concretely with data on budgetary outlays, with Congress appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars annually. When economists such as the late Harvard economist Martin Feldstein have encouraged economics PhD students to pursue research on the economics of national security, they have generally guided students towards researching topics such as military compensation, analysis and prediction of armed conflicts, and terrorism.² While such topics are obviously quite important, the topic of focus here – namely, the heavy reliance of the U.S. national security innovation base on foreign national STEM advanced degree holders – has thus far not been a focus of researchers working on the economics of national security.³

Policy context

It was evident the national security policy discussion was connected to innovation and international talent at least by the time the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) released its report on A 21st Century Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for America’s National Security (National Science and Technology Council, 2016a). This NSTC report argued: “…the institutions that contribute to the national security science, technology, and innovation infrastructure should be, wherever possible, able to draw on the world’s best and brightest minds regardless of citizenship” (at p.12) and that “sensible immigration policies, including for skilled immigrants in specialty technical areas, particularly for those educated in U.S. universities, must continue to be a goal” (at p.14). Notably, the discussion was largely framed in terms of workforce dynamics. For example, later that same year another NSTC report (National Science and Technology Council, 2016b), this one focused on strategic planning on artificial intelligence R&D, argued that “while no official AI workforce data currently exist, numerous recent reports from the commercial and academic sectors are indicating an increased shortage of available experts in AI… Additional studies are needed to better understand the current and future national workforce needs for AI R&D.”

A few years later, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) was founded at Georgetown University which – among other topics – would take the lead on both original research and synthesis of existing data on this topic. For example, CSET’s 2019 report Immigration Policy and the U.S. AI Sector (Arnold, 2019) quantified the importance of immigrant talent to the AI industry and argued that U.S. immigration policies were lagging behind policies of peer countries in the race for talent. In testifying at a hearing on AI and the workforce (House Budget Committee, 2020), the founding director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology accentuated the necessity of inserting immigration into the discussion by explaining that: “We should ensure that we remain an attractive destination for global talent by broadening and accelerating the pathways to permanent residency for scientists and engineers.” (at p.58).

Later that year, the Future of Defense Task Force (2020) of the House Armed Services Committee connected these threads by recommending the U.S. invest in domestic STEM primary education; attract and retain foreign STEM talent, including supporting H.R. 7256 (116th, National Security Innovation Pathway Act), discussed below; and improve federal government hiring for STEM talent including at the Pentagon. When the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued its final report the following year, both immigration and workforce recommendations were extensively featured (The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, 2021). The AI Commission directed numerous recommendations on the necessity of cultivating more domestic talent, discussing the needs of U.S. markets as well as those of the national security enterprise. Moreover, the Commission argued that immigration reform is a national security imperative, associating the value of attracting and retaining highly skilled individuals to gaining strategic and economic advantages over competitors. As the President’s National Security Advisor remarked at the AI Commission’s global emerging technology summit, “We have to [ensure] it’s easier for America to be the destination of choice for the best and brightest scientists and technologists around the world.” (White House, 2021)

Artificial intelligence is of course just one of many strategically significant industries. O’Brien & Ozimek (2024) spell out the inherent reasoning animating the connection points between talent, innovation, and economic competitiveness in a range of sectors: strategic industries are increasingly reliant on highly skilled workers (share with a graduate degree grew from 12.4% to 19.6% since 2000), and foreign-born workers account for a disproportionate and increasing share of highly-skilled workers in strategic industries (growing from 26% to 36% since 2000). India and China are the largest source countries for skilled foreign-born professionals in strategic industries in the U.S., comprising over 40% of college-educated workers, despite facing the tightest country-specific caps on employment-based green cards. Overall, despite representing 14% of the U.S. population, foreign-born experts comprise 37% of the workforce with advanced STEM degrees for DoD-funded projects (Chase & Neufeld, forthcoming). Moreover, many more advanced STEM degree immigrants are engaged in broader U.S.-based research and development initiatives advancing U.S. technological development beyond those directly funded by the DoD, in scientific development and engineering services generally, and in many specific industries – including electronics manufacturing, space research, and aerospace and aircraft manufacturing.

Figure 1: Reliance on foreign-born STEM talent, defense-related industries versus other industries

This replicates an unnumbered figure from Neufeld (2022) using IPUMS [American Community Survey] data. STEM fields are matched to the DHS STEM Designated Degree Program List:11,13,20,21,24,25, 36,37,38,50,51,52,55,59,61. For defense industries, following the Vital Signs report (2020) we use the following industries as defense industrial base industries (also called defense-related industries): selected durable industrial goods manufacturing: (NAICS codes: 325M, 3252, 3255, 326, 327, 331, 332, 333, 335, 336), selected information and communication technologies (NAICS 334, 5112, 517, 518, 5415) and scientific research and development (NAICS 5417). The classification of DHS STEM Designated Degree Program List is likely not a perfect match with Neufeld (2022), but the graph closely resembles Neufeld’s figure.

Figure 2: Reliance on foreign-born STEM talent, by sector

From Chase and Neufeld (forthcoming).

These realities have led many national security experts to conclude that congressional action is needed to encourage additional foreign national STEM advanced degree holders to be admitted to the U.S., as evidenced by the concerns expressed by over 45 national security experts and officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations in a letter in the last (117th) congress to congressional leadership (Snyder & Allen-Ebrahimian, 2022).

This focus on critical and emerging technologies (National Science and Technology Council, 2024) in DoD-funded activities is more broadly consistent with a changing target of federal support for the national defense, which incorporates innovation and economic competitiveness. Instead of defense funding to support DoD narrowly, there is a movement toward a much broader conceptualization of the U.S. national security innovation base. As described by the Congressional Research Service (2023), during the first 150 years of its history, the United States devoted relatively few resources to the management and maintenance of a permanent defense industrial base. Dating back roughly to America’s entry into World War II, the concept of a defense industrial base – generally used to refer to a broad set of organizations that supply the U.S. government, primarily but not exclusively the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), with materials and services for defense purposes – has featured much more centrally in national security and national defense policy discussions. In recent years, the policy emphasis has shifted further towards what is often described as the National Security Innovation Base. To reference one definition from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, the National Security Innovation Base is defined as a broad array of actors including various research centers and laboratories, universities and academia, venture capital, and the innovative systems of American allies and partners – noting, “In order to sustain America’s competitive advantage and to achieve its national security objectives, the common purpose and coordinated efforts of these key stakeholders are vital.” The 2022 National Defense Strategy (US Department of Defense, 2022) is one recent federal agency document echoing this focus, noting “…we will act urgently to build enduring advantages across the defense ecosystem – the Department of Defense, the defense industrial base, and the array of private sector and academic enterprises that create and sharpen the Joint Force’s technological edge.”

Thus, industries producing goods or services critical to national defense are often the leading examples, but from a policy perspective, these are frequently addressed together with goods such as semiconductors that are also strategically significant – for a variety of reasons including supply chain dynamics (Hunt & Zwetsloot, 2020). Neufeld (2022) argues that looking at strategic technology sectors, the workforce share with advanced STEM degrees is often quite high: around 50% of the workforce at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, 2020), and around 70% for quantum computing (Kaur & Venegas-Gomez, 2022) as well as machine learning and data science (Kaggle, 2019).

The shift in emphasis toward strategic innovation and economic competitiveness has resonated in particular in recent thinking about China, including a focus on the talent nexus. Zwetsloot et al. (2021) is one recent analysis comparing the STEM PhD pipelines of the United States and China. Figure 1 documents that since around 2005, China has consistently produced more STEM PhDs than the U.S., with a gap that has widened – and, based on current enrollment patterns, is projected to continue to widen – over time. If international students are excluded from the U.S. count, Chinese STEM PhD graduates would outnumber their U.S. counterparts more than three-to-one.

Figure 3: China projected to nearly double U.S. STEM PhD graduates by 2025

This replicates Figure 1 of Zwetsloot et al. (2021), for which the underlying data is the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) for U.S. data and Ministry of Education for Chinese data (see their Appendix A for details). The U.S. (Domestic) series aims to remove international students from the US (Total) series.

As the House China Task Force (2020) found in its report, the data show that in the near and medium term, the U.S. will remain reliant on foreign talent and thus the U.S. must compete in the global race for talent and both attract and retain the best and brightest immigrant minds to contribute to the U.S. economy and drive U.S. productivity. A December 2023 report from the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – Reset, Prevent, Build: A Strategy to Win America’s Economic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party (US House of Representatives, 2023) – describes 150 policy recommendations to embrace “the clear reality that our current economic relationship with the People’s Republic of China needs to be reset in order to serve the economic and national security interests of the United States.” The report’s recommended investments in technological leadership and economic resilience center on addressing concerns that the U.S. is “falling behind in the race for leadership in certain critical technologies,” and that China is “gaining on the U.S. in the race for global talent.” The bipartisan recommendations also highlight that screening and vetting concerns need to be applied in ways that allow the U.S. to make progress with partners on collaborative efforts on critical and emerging technologies and should include a work authorization program for STEM experts from such allied nations (US House of Representatives, 2023).

Through both Republican and Democratic control of the presidency and houses of Congress, the issue is now joined, and is understood to require a whole-of-government approach (Future of Defense Task Force (2020); Senate Armed Services Committee (2020)).

Executive and legislative branch efforts

Regulatory and statutory framework for attracting and retaining foreign national STEM advanced degree holders

The U.S. immigration framework for selecting immigrants based on their skills, education, talents and future employment contributions to the U.S. continues to be based on the construct of the original Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), last comprehensively updated in 1990 Act amendments to the INA when most of the present numerical limits were adopted (Bier, 2023). In this same era, Congress took note in 1950, when it established the National Science Foundation (NSF), that the science and engineering workforce was key to U.S. interests in fostering innovation, economic competitiveness, and national security (National Science Board, 2015), but this did not come with a companion expectation that such vital U.S. interests required the nation’s immigration rules and statutes to systematically provide access to foreign national STEM advanced degree holders who wanted to become Americans. Likewise, the 1990 Act amendments, including numerical caps, were developed before the STEM acronym became a standard reference at NSF, when the nation’s population was three-quarters of its current size, and when the real GDP of the U.S. economy was half its current size. And, the last pre-pandemic year of data show that in the 30 years following the 1990 Act the number of international students earning degrees at U.S. institutions of higher education increased over 300%, about half in STEM (Congressional Research Service, 2019). Layering in today’s national security imperatives to retain foreign-born scientists, technologists, and engineers, the outdated regulatory and statutory immigration framework creates challenges.

Recent government actions

Awareness of the vital role international STEM talent plays in driving interconnected economic and national security has resulted in both the executive and legislative branches making recent efforts. Over the last three years the executive branch has sought to improve use of existing agency authorities that relate to international STEM talent, and the prior two congresses have seen the development of legislative language specifically targeting more access to lawful permanent resident status (green card status) for foreign-born STEM advanced degree holders.

Most recently, departments and agencies have adopted an approach of announcing policy guidance (White House, 2022) to explain which international STEM experts qualify for status and U.S. employment under existing binding regulations (Rampell, 2022). As summarized in Table 1 the approach has been used for STEM OPT (the post-completion optional practical training program for STEM graduates of US universities), O-1A status (the visa category for noncitizens with extraordinary ability), classification as an Employment-Based Second Preference immigrant based on National Interest Waiver (NIW), and the J-1 Early Career STEM Research Initiative (exchange visitors at companies instead of just on campuses pursuing scholarly research).

STEM OPT guidance from DHS on degree list updates. Optional Practical Training (OPT) by default allows up to 12 months of employment in the U.S. post-graduation, and STEM graduates are eligible for a 24 month extension (so 36 months total). An annual nominations process allows DHS to keep the STEM OPT extension-qualifying degree list (called the Designated Degree Program List) up to date over time.

O-1A guidance from DHS. O-1A nonimmigrant status is available to people with “extraordinary ability” measured by achievements in science, business, education, or athletics. In January 2022, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2022a) provided guidance on O-1A eligibility including clarifications and examples for STEM PhD graduates. Importantly, O-1A visa disbursement is uncapped, but tabulations of foreign-born STEM PhD graduates against O-1A take-up suggests this pathway is underutilized.

National Interest Waiver (NIW) guidance from DHS. The NIW EB2 advanced degree immigrant category allows certain highly qualified people to self-petition for a green card. In January 2022, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2022b) provided guidance on how STEM Master’s or PhD graduates may qualify for eligibility based on the merit of their work and relevance of their work to national interests (e.g.,if they are poised to make contributions in a critical or emerging technology field).

J-1 researcher guidance from DOS. The J-1 exchange visitor program authorizes people to – among other things – study, teach, research, or intern in the U.S. (described by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [2023]). The US Department of State (2022)-led Early Career STEM Research Initiative connects sponsoring firms and research organizations with J-1 visa holders who seek STEM research experience with industry. J-1 researchers are expected to return home after visa expiration (5-year maximum) and are often subject to the 2-year home residency requirement.

H-1B research cap exemptions regulation from DHS. H-1B cap-exempt employers include institutions of higher education, non-profit entities affiliated with institutions of higher education, and non-profit research or governmental research organizations. The rulemaking required by Executive Order of October 30 (2023) includes clarification on cap-exemption for non-profits where research is a central focus and for employees at for-profit firms that collaborate with university-based or non-profit research organizations.

J-1 exchange visitor skills list regulation from DOS. The Exchange Visitor Skills List details the “specialized knowledge and skills that are deemed necessary for the development of an exchange visitor’s home country” (US Department of State, 2009). Executive Order of October 30 (2023) requires the Department of State to consider criteria to update countries and skills on the Skills List, as it relates to the 2-year home residency requirement. A revised list has the potential to broaden the scope and quantity of exchange visitors to the U.S., especially in STEM fields critical to the U.S.

Schedule A regulation from DOL. Schedule A is a designation for employment-based entry to those working in fields – parameterized by the Department of Labor – as lacking “sufficient U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available pursuant to regulation” (US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2024a). Executive Order of October 30 (2023) requires the Labor Department to publish a Request for Information to identify AI and other STEM occupations as qualified for Schedule A designation.

While very little formal research has been conducted on these pathways, in some cases descriptive data makes clear that policy shifts at the agency level of this sort can matter. For example, use of the O-1A classification for experts involved in STEM activities increased by 33% in the two years following new policy guidance on how STEM PhDs can use the category (Mervis, 2023).

Moreover, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2024b) data suggests that providing policy guidance about NIW for EB2 advanced degree holders has led more immigrants to use an employment-based green card category that allows timely, more certain adjudications that is self-petitioning, such that about 9% of petitions for advanced degree holders in STEM used NIW before the policy guidance and now about 37% of such petitions for advanced STEM degree holders utilize NIW.

• FY2019 (last pre-pandemic year’s data as DHS was developing NIW guidance in 2021): 5,600 NIW approvals for STEM experts out of 77,550 total EB2 petition approvals of which 59,950 in total were for professionals engaged in STEM activities.
• FY2023 (first full year following policy announcement in January 2022): 21,240 NIW approvals for STEM experts out of 81,380 total EB2 petition approvals of which 57,150 in total were for professionals engaged in STEM activities.

To further agency efforts in this vein, the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (Executive Order of October 30, 2023) instructs departments and agencies explore further avenues, some of which are summarized in Table 1, to facilitate the attraction and retention of foreign-born STEM experts, including by notice and comment rulemaking.⁴

Actions by the executive branch thus appear – at least in the aggregate – to have the potential to generate consequential improvements in the ability of the United States to attract and retain international STEM talent. However, 85% of high-skilled immigrants working on DoD projects are naturalized citizens (Chase & Neufeld, forthcoming), reflecting the fact that security clearances render the feeble availability of green cards a major constraint in DoD’s ability to expand recruitment of the foreign-born talent already in the United States. Only the legislative branch can establish a new category of lawful permanent residents selected for their advanced STEM expertise that contributes to critical and emerging technology fields, and allocate numbers for such new green cards that then lead to naturalization eligibility.

A bipartisan group of 70 national security experts and officials made these points in a May 2023 letter (Snyder & Cai, 2023) to the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party imploring congressional action on international STEM talent because when America attracts the world’s best and brightest many “will be working in Pentagon-identified critical technology areas.” It seems the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a likely place to consider statutory changes targeting the relationship between STEM experts and security, as does legislation focused on industrial policy on critical industries key to international technology competition, such as CHIPS and Science legislation, as these are bipartisan efforts squarely focused on the nation’s security priorities.

The animating logic tree behind this line of legislative efforts, summarized in Table 2, focusing on STEM green cards, is that:

• First, technology and innovation is at the heart of strategic competition and the United States can win the competition only if we can reliably tap into the global supply of STEM talent, and
• Second, the most effective way to attract the global talent America needs is to remove green card caps for some segment of advanced STEM R&D talent most likely to make important contributions for the United States in the technology sectors that matter most to our national security.

The 117th Congress featured some of these efforts. Table 2 reflects that in summer 2022 there was an effort around adding a generous provision to the NDAA for FY23 that would provide STEM green cards without numerical limit to certain foreign-born STEM PhDs earning doctorates from research-intensive universities in fields relevant to critical industries or critical and emerging technologies (Gilmer, 2022b). The Advanced STEM Degrees NDAA amendment driven by Rep. Lofgren (D-CA) was based on Section 80303 of the House-passed America COMPETES Act and garnered bipartisan support, but ultimately was not ruled in order for a House vote (Gilmer, 2022a). Similarly, Section 80303 in the House’s America COMPETES Act allowed for both STEM Master’s and PhDs from research-intensive universities both in the U.S. and abroad to secure green card status in certain situations. While Section 80303 passed the House in February 2022, it was not taken up in the Senate or in the conference that led to the CHIPS and Science Act enacted in August 2022 (Anderson, 2022).

H.R. 7256. A bill proposed to develop a special immigrant visa for individuals employed by a U.S. firm or academic institution engaged in national security efforts that protect and promote the U.S. innovation base, conduct research funded by the Department of Defense, or who have technical expertise in a domain pursuant to National Defense Strategy or the National Defense Science and Technology Strategy. The plan imposes a cap of 100 principals in fiscal year 2021, increasing by 100 annually until fiscal year 2025 and remains at 500 principals thereafter. There was no legislative action on the bill (H.R. 7256, 2020).

H.R. 4350 and H.R. 6395. Two amendments proposed to the NDAA for fiscal years 2021 and 2022 would allow the Department of Defense to develop a competitive process to identify individuals “essential” to advancing technologies critical to national security. In practice, this would be implemented as a special immigrant visa for individuals working on university-based research funded by the Department of Defense or individuals possessing specific scientific or technical expertise. The plan imposes a cap of 10 principals in its first fiscal year, increasing by 10 annually until its tenth fiscal year, and remains at 100 principals thereafter. Despite passing in the House, the bill was ultimately dropped in Conference before the enactment of the NDAA (H.R. 4350, 2021; H.R. 6395, 2020).

H.R. 4521. Section 80303 of what became the House version of the CHIPS bill proposed to exempt foreign-born, STEM Master’s or PhD graduates from select U.S. and foreign higher education institutions from worldwide and per-country caps. Applicants must already have an approved EB1 or EB2 petition and have graduated from a “research-intensive” institution. Additionally, Master’s graduates must have their employer sponsor be in a critical industry. Despite passing in the House, the bill was dropped in conference before the enactment of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 (H.R. 4521, 2022).

NDAA administration ask, DoD Scientists and Experts. An amendment proposed to the NDAA for fiscal year 2023, drawn from a request of the Department of Defense to secure the admission of essential scientists and other technical experts to enhance the technological superiority of the U.S. In practice, this would be implemented as a special immigrant visa for individuals working in specific fields or on research advancing national security, as determined by the Department of Defense. The provision was never voted on in the House or Senate (DoD Scientists and Experts, 2022).

NDAA amendment, Advanced STEM Degrees. An amendment proposed in the House to the NDAA for 2023 that exempts select STEM PhDs from worldwide green card limits and per-country caps. To qualify, applicants must already have an approved EB1 or EB2 petition, have graduated from a “research-intensive” institution (though there is no requirement that they confer their degree from a U.S. institution of higher education), and work in a field critical to national security. Despite bipartisan support, the bill was never voted on in the House or Senate: the House Rules Committee ruled that the amendment was not budget-neutral (Advanced STEM Degrees, 2022).

S. 2384. A bill proposed to exempt STEM Master’s or PhD graduates from any U.S. higher education institution from worldwide green card limits and per-country caps. To qualify, graduates would need to be employed by or have an employment offer from a U.S. employer who has completed the DOL Labor Certification process and be compensated a salary in excess of their occupation-level median. Additionally, the bill establishes permission for F-students enrolled in a STEM program to seek legal permanent residence and still maintain F-1 student status in the U.S. The bill has been introduced in the last three congresses in both houses, but has not yet been voted on in either the House or Senate (S. 2384, 2023).

NDAA amendment, Defense Researchers. An amendment proposed in the House to the NDAA for FY25, with possible companion amendment in the Senate, that allows up to 5,000 individuals each year who either hold STEM PhDs related to fields critical to national security or at least six years of experience in such fields to obtain new conditional green card status, and explicitly anticipates eligibility for international students earning STEM degrees in the U.S. or experts working abroad. The STEM experts must be citizens of a FVEY, QUAD, or NATO country, and will utilize a new conditional green card classification with mandated screening and new vetting programs. Conditions to green card status are removable after satisfactory vetting and three years of R&D employment in certain fields, without tying status to a singular employer, where qualifying employment is limited to projects funded or overseen by DoD, or other agencies, or in fields critical to national security (FORTRESS Act, 2024).

Current data and research needs

Measuring, and estimating the drivers of stay rates for foreign national STEM advanced degree holders

In many policy discussions around STEM immigration, key questions are raised about numbers that no one has data on – implying that, unfortunately, policy analysts and decision-makers in the executive and legislative branches do not have access to many of the key facts that would, ideally, form the basis for evidence-informed policy design and implementation. As a leading example, policy discussions related to providing additional green cards for foreign national STEM advanced degree holders would benefit from knowing answers to questions such as: How many immigrants with STEM PhDs became lawful permanent residents annually? Of new STEM PhDs earned in the U.S., what share leave the U.S. versus work initially on temporary visas versus secure legal permanent residence status? Of those who leave the U.S. initially, what share ever return? Of those who initially work on temporary visas, what share stay and eventually transition on to have legal permanent resident status and how long does that take? And, with regard to STEM PhDs earning their degree outside the U.S., how many make their way to the U.S. and how many initially come as post-doctoral fellows or through other pathways?

A natural starting point for such questions is the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, which annually attempts to gather information on the census of newly minted PhD graduates from U.S. universities and includes some information on their post-doctoral plans, and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which draws its pool of potential respondents from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and attempts to follow them longitudinally. For example, Zwetsloot et al. (2020) use the Survey of Earned Doctorates to document that intention-to-stay rates among international PhD graduates – who account for a significant portion of STEM PhD graduates from U.S. universities – are 70 percent or higher in all STEM fields, and are above 85 percent for students from Iran, India, and China. A follow-up by Corrigan et al. (2022) uses the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to document that roughly 77 percent of STEM PhD graduates from U.S. universities between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the U.S.

Taken at face value, these findings could be interpreted as saying that foreign national STEM PhD students trained at U.S. universities who want to stay in the U.S. post-graduation largely are able to find pathways through which to do so. Of course, even if all individuals who want to stay are able to do so – eventually – doesn’t mean from a policy perspective that the currently existing pathways under which individuals do stay are timely or feature optimal predictability. Indeed, Olszewski et al. (2024) argue: “…one of the most widely cited reasons driving foreign STEM talent to leave the United States (and discouraging it from coming) is the country’s difficult-to-navigate immigration and naturalization rules governing who can come and who can stay.” Moreover, data on past cohorts of foreign national STEM PhDs is not necessarily predictive of what is happening today nor what might happen in the future, given dramatic increases in visa backlogs and uncertainty about our high-skilled immigration system’s adjudications both in petition adjudications⁵ and visa applications.⁶

Moreover, by construction, the Survey of Earned Doctorates and Survey of Doctorate Recipients of course focus on PhD recipients, and analogous individual-level data is not available – to the best of our knowledge – on bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates. Research such as Beine et al. (2022), who analyze university-by-year-level aggregate data on counts of international students, suggests that only around 23 percent of foreign nationals in U.S. master’s programs transition into the U.S. workforce.

An alternative starting point would be administrative data on F-1 visas supporting international students to study at U.S. universities linked to longitudinal data from either Census or Treasury which could follow individuals who at some point appear on F-1 visas over time. Many foreign nationals that firms wish to hire start out on F-1 visas, and such data could provide the basis for research on how policy and non-policy factors might affect the stay rates of students. For example, how have policy and regulatory changes such as the H-1B cap exemption for nonprofit research organizations, changes in the time allowed for temporary employment for international students under the OPT program,⁷ and increased use of J visas for researchers changed stay rates, adjustments of status, and work behavior of students originally trained at U.S. universities?

In recent years both Census and Treasury have made tremendous progress in compiling datasets – such as the Census’s Business Dynamics Statistics of Innovative Firms (BDS-IF) project (Goldschlag & Perlman, 2017) – that start to lay the groundwork for tabulating these types of statistics, but they are missing one critical input which is that they lack data on temporary visas – e.g. which students are in the U.S. on F-1 visas, which researchers are in the U.S. on J-1 visas, which STEM PhDs are employed on H-1B visas. These types of data reside at agencies like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Student and Exchange Visitor Program Office (SEVP) of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, components of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. But in principle, these records can be linked at the individual level with administrative data from Census or Treasury to begin to measure and study the types of questions outlined above. Importantly, such linked Census records could then be made available to other researchers via the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDC) infrastructure (US Census Bureau, 2024), which research suggests could meaningfully impact scientific progress on this topic (Nagaraj & Tranchero, 2023).

Modeling the expected effects of policy counterfactuals

As illustrated in Table 2 above, the handful of recent legislative proposals in this area – while similar in their broad goal of attracting and retaining foreign national STEM advanced degree holders – differ along several dimensions that may or may not be quantitatively important. Take as two examples S. 2384 (the Keep STEM Talent Act of 2023) and H.R. 4521 (the America COMPETES Act of 2022) Section 80303. S. 2384 required a job offer paying more than median wages for a given occupation and geographic area, and was exclusively limited to employers with an approved Labor Certification. Section 80303 was limited to STEM graduate degrees earned at universities capable of providing research-intensified training but permitted qualifying degrees from both the U.S. and abroad, and included those working with extraordinary ability or in the national interest who Congress has exempted from the Labor Certification. The two pieces of legislation also differed in which classes of employment-based green cards (EB1, EB2, EB3) were exempted from statutory limits.

Better understanding the expected effects of these differences in policy design would directly inform policy development efforts, but would also inform various modeling efforts that are required of agencies across the executive and legislative branches. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – sometimes in collaboration with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) – is required to provide information to Congress, and the public, on the expected budgetary and economic effects of such legislative efforts. When CBO modeled (Congressional Budget Office, 2022) the budgetary effects of H.R. 4521, Section 80303, CBO analysts needed to estimate how exempting employment-based green cards from statutory limits for applicants (as well as their accompanying spouse and minor children) who have earned a doctoral or master’s degree in a STEM field at a U.S. research institution or foreign equivalent would affect the number and characteristics of foreign nationals in the U.S. over time (particularly over the 10-year budget window).

To provide a flavor of what type of work is required for such modeling, consider as a publicly available example the recent work of Esche et al. (2023) who developed a population modeling approach for a H.R. 4521, Section 80303-style legislative provision which was shared with the Penn Wharton Budget Model for use in modeling the expected budgetary effects of granting green cards to immigrants with advanced STEM degrees (Penn Wharton, 2024; Elmendorf & Williams, 2024).

At a high level, Esche et al. (2023) attempt to articulate and (roughly) estimate every mechanism through which a policy change to employment-based green card quotas affects the number of foreign nationals in the United States and the composition of the U.S. population by immigration status, education, country-of-origin, gender, and age. The starting point for their work is recognition of the fact that an increase in the number of green cards made available by law does not translate into a one-for-one increase in the number of people in the U.S. Moreover, there is no straightforward way to simply divide newly available green cards between new arrivals and people already in the U.S. Instead, behavioral responses by the foreign-born population must be accounted for which significantly complicates this picture. For example, the availability of new green cards changes expected wait times and therefore has an effect on an individual’s choices between green cards and temporary visas; choices between staying in the U.S. versus leaving; and the choice to come to the U.S. at all. Furthermore, these choices can in turn have cascading effects across the immigration system. For instance, someone who chooses to apply for a green card instead of a temporary visa such as an H-1B may free up a temporary visa slot for another individual who is not eligible for the newly uncapped green card pathway. Taken together, Esche et al. (2023) attempt to catalog an exhaustive list of sixteen different mechanisms by which changes to the number of employment-based green cards affect the size and composition of the U.S. population over time.

Esche et al. (2023) then present methods to quantitatively estimate the magnitude of each of these sixteen mechanisms. The methods were intentionally designed to be feasibly implemented in data sources that are currently publicly available. Esche et al. (2023) then apply the implied estimates to assess the expected population effects of an H.R. 4521, Section 80303-style legislative provision over time. For example, an increase in employment-based green cards reduces the expected wait time for individuals in the green card backlog and shifts the age composition of those receiving green cards. Combining green card backlog modeling from the Congressional Research Service (Congressional Research Service, 2020) and public data on the age of those in the green card backlog, Esche et al. (2023) track how the age composition changes over time as new green cards change the pace at which green cards are awarded. In addition, the backlog wait time modeling exercise identifies the necessary time shifting for when individuals change immigration status under a policy change. Estimated wait times are also combined with recent literature from Kahn & MacGarvie (2020) and Khosla (2018) on green card delays and the stay rates of international students to estimate changes in retention. Esche et al. (2023) also draw on work by Zavodny (2022), who provides tabulations of characteristics of derivative H-4 spouses who would be authorized to work in the U.S., and estimates from Carr & Tienda (2013) were applied to estimate expected sponsorship patterns via family-based pathways.⁸

This population modeling by Esche et al. (2023) was shared with the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan, research-based initiative at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania that provides economic analysis of the budgetary impact of proposed policy changes. Penn Wharton in turn applied this work to estimate the expected budgetary effects of granting green cards to immigrants with advanced STEM degrees (Penn Wharton, 2024), providing – essentially – an analogous estimate to CBO’s official cost estimate of the budgetary effects of H.R. 4521, Section 80303.

Of course, many executive and legislative branch efforts other than just the Congressional Budget Office are required to analyze the expected effects of Section 80303-style proposals. For example, the White House also takes efforts designed to model the expected effects of such policies as an input into work across various components of the Executive Office of the President. Applied modeling work estimating the expected effects of policy counterfactuals – along the lines of the work of Esche et al. (2023) – could thus be useful to a broad set of policy analysts and federal agencies.

Estimating the effects of foreign national STEM advanced degree holders on the U.S. economy

Proposals to increase the number of high-skill immigrants in a country frequently tout the potential for substantial economic benefits via additional labor supply, entrepreneurship, and innovation. The academic literature suggests – in a variety of ways – that immigrants make substantial contributions across commercial, scientific, and other domains. However, the literature offers relatively limited evidence on the expected effects of specific policy change, and is thus limited in its ability to inform policy development efforts in terms of guiding what types of policy changes are likely to be most effective in achieving a given policy goal.

One frequently discussed policy proposal is to guarantee legal permanent residency for foreign-born STEM PhD students, especially those earning degrees in the U.S. How would such a policy affect the number and characteristics of the foreign-born present in the U.S., and what would the economic effects of this type of policy change be? Raymond and Soltas (in progress) designed a randomized experiment aimed at shedding light on these questions by leveraging experimental variation in “de-facto” immigration policy. Their research is leveraging an unusual policy environment that has emerged due to changes in regulatory guidance around the “O-1A” visa for individuals with “extraordinary ability.” As discussed in Section 3, this visa category – once rarely used – now explicitly covers accomplished foreign-born STEM PhD candidates at U.S. universities.

However, the USCIS guidance that explicitly clarified that guidance has not yet been widely diffused, and take-up of O-1A visas is, not unexpectedly, low. Raymond and Soltas’s experiment will make the O-1A guidance salient to a random subset of eligible candidates through an encouragement design. Leveraging this variation, Raymond and Soltas will then be able to track researchers’ outcomes longitudinally and across a range of potential impacts: where they live, where they work, entrepreneurship, academic research, and patenting.

Conclusions

Economic research has the opportunity to lay the groundwork for fact-based and evidence-based policy debates over critical policy questions, such as how best to encourage innovation and economic growth. Economic researchers have made critical contributions to understanding many key aspects of the economics of immigration – such as estimating the self-selection of immigrants, the economic impacts of immigrants on natives, and analyses of the impacts of specific immigration policies such as the H-1B visa lottery. However, unfortunately economists and economic research have been less attentive to the types of policy changes related to high-skilled immigration that have been pursued in recent years by the U.S. via executive branch and legislative policy decisions. Working on a number of high-skilled immigration policy development efforts propels the attempt of this paper to highlight areas where investments in generating additional economic data and research would be invaluable in informing more evidence-based policy discussions in the coming years.

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Tables

Table 1: Selected actions by departments and agencies targeting foreign national advanced STEM degree holders

Table 2: Comparison of recent legislative efforts in the 116th, 117th, 118th congresses targeting foreign national advanced STEM degree holders