US crackdown on foreign students threatens to disrupt inventor pipeline

The U.S. hosted over 1.1 million international college students in the 2023-24 academic year, as per IIE

- Paul Kiernan

AJay Bhatt had never been on a plane when he left India for City University of New York to pursue a graduate degree in 1981. More than four decades and 130 patents later, billions of people are still using Bhatt's most-recognizable invention, the Universal Serial Bus, or USB.

"My dad really didn't want me to go," Bhatt recalls. But, he said, "This was the country where you could get the very best education, and everybody was welcoming."

High-skilled immigration has long been part of the secret sauce that gave the U.S. the world's most dynamic economy. Studies show newcomers punch well above their weight in innovative output and entrepreneurship. They authored 23% of U.S. patents from 1990 to 2016, according to a 2022 study by Shai Bernstein of Harvard Business School and four co-authors. They founded or co-founded more than half of America's billion-dollar startups, according to another study. Immigrants co-founded or played a major early role in Nvidia, Alphabet and Tesla. From Elon Musk to lesser-known figures such as Bhatt, many of these inventors and founders originally came to the U.S. on student visas. President Trump's policies could disrupt that pipeline.

In May, the Trump administration paused interviews with student-visa candidates to vet their social-media activity and said it would begin to "aggressively revoke" the visas of Chinese students at U.S. universities. It also sought to block Harvard University from enrolling foreign students; that order has been stayed by a federal judge.

On Wednesday night, the Trump administration banned citizens of a dozen countries from entering the U.S., as well as those from countries including Cuba, Venezuela, and Laos from applying for student visas. The president also issued an order that effectively bans foreign nationals from attending Harvard University.