Amendment to give more green cards to international grads fails
Proposals to exempt international students and other immigrants with graduate degrees in science and engineering from immigration caps receive bipartisan backing, yet supporters have failed to win approval for such measures in the U.S. Congress.
The latest instance was on Tuesday, when the House Rules Committee rejected on technical grounds an amendment to an annual defense-authorization bill that would have waived green-card limits for people with doctorates in STEM fields. Lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee opposed the provision because it would have charged applicants a fee; the objecting legislators said the fee amounted to a new tax that should have been approved first by their committee.
The failure to win inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act is the most-recent setback for efforts to make it easier for graduates in critical STEM fields to stay in the United States after they earn their degrees.
President Biden has long called for stapling a green card to every STEM graduate degree, and he proposed immigration reform on his first day in office that included the STEM provision, but it has gone nowhere. More recently, legislation to invest in research to help the United States compete with China contained similar language — it would have exempted all graduate students in STEM from the caps, not just Ph.D.s — but negotiations on the bill have stalled. And Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who favors restrictions on immigration, has said he would try to block the STEM exemption and other immigration-related provisions in particular.
Yet there is popular support for retaining more graduates in high-demand science and technological fields. A bipartisan group of former national-security officials wrote to Congress in May to urge passage of the competition bill and specifically the STEM exemption. More than half of respondents in a 2021 survey by the American Council on Education said they favored the STEM proposal, and 60 percent said international graduates should be allowed to stay in the United States and work after graduation if they followed proper legal channels.
Higher-education groups have advocated for such measures because they fear that roadblocks to staying in the United States could make it increasingly difficult to attract international students in the first place. American colleges are heavily dependent on foreign talent, especially in STEM fields — nearly 60 percent of doctoral recipients in engineering and mathematics and computer science are on student visas, federal data show.
On Tuesday members of the Rules Committee also voted down an amendment that would have prohibited colleges with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, or with entities linked to the party, from getting U.S. Department of Homeland Security grants. Legislators have used a past defense-authorization bill to make a similar policy change, preventing colleges with Confucius Institutes — language and cultural centers supported by the Chinese government — from receiving Defense Department funds. More than 100 institutes have closed in recent years, leaving fewer than 20 on American campuses.
However, several other amendments related to international education are among the 650 that could be considered when the defense bill is voted on by the full U.S. House of Representatives: One would allow for the expedited immigration of scientists and other technical experts to promote innovation and national security, and another would establish a State Department program for the study of Mandarin, Uyghur, Tibetan, Cantonese, and other East Asian languages at rural and underserved universities.
Another amendment to be taken up would prevent dependent children of green-card applicants from aging out of the legal immigration system.
The defense legislation is one of the few bipartisan bills in Congress, so its eventual passage is expected.
