For all his criticism and condemnation of higher education, Texas governor Gregg Abbott is proud of the state’s institutions. He’s designated billions of public dollars to fund them. Speaking to a crowd of 400 higher ed leaders at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s leadership conference in 2023, Abbott praised attendees for putting the state “on a trajectory of excellence in higher education.”
A high-quality higher education has many components, he said, but one of the most important elements “is having top-notch research universities to educate the next generation of innovative leaders needed by employers in the state.”
He told the crowd that the reason CEOs are choosing to call Texas home is because of the “premier workforce” universities are creating.
It’s puzzling, then, that as he’s championing the state’s research might, he has made it harder for institutions to attract the best academic talent in the world. Last week Abbott put a freeze until the end of May next year on public universities granting new H-1B visas without first obtaining written permission from the Texas Workforce Commission.
For nearly 40 years, universities have used H-1B visas to attract the best and brightest minds to their institutions. With 12 public, R-1 research universities, Texas has the second highest number of H-1B visa holders in the country, behind California’s colleges. Lawmakers allowed universities to be exempt from the national annual cap on H-1B visas because they recognized how important foreign academic talent is to the innovation economy and training the next generation of workers.
When Abbott announced the freeze, he cited reports of abuse of the H-1B visa program and said he wanted to ensure “American jobs are going to American workers.” But higher education isn’t using cheap foreign labor to avoid hiring American citizens. On the contrary, institutions are competing in a global marketplace against China, who introduced its own version of an H-1B visa last year, and English-speaking peers in the U.K., Canada and Australia to bring the best mathematicians, epidemiologists, economists and others to their campuses.
Abbott understands how important academic research is to the Texas economy. In 2023, he signed into law the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund meant to encourage the expansion of the semi-conductor industry in the state and “further develop the expertise and capacity of Texas institutions of higher education” in order to maintain the state’s position as “the nation’s leader in semiconductor manufacturing.”
In December, Abbott awarded $4.8 million from the fund to the Texas Quantum Institute (TQI) at the University of Texas at Austin to establish the QLab, a quantum-enhanced semiconductor metrology facility.
TQI co-director Elaine Li is a physicist from China. According to her UT Austin bio, she came to the U.S. after her professor at Beijing Normal University encouraged her to expand her horizons. She thought “What the heck? It might be fun,” and so she enrolled at the University of Michigan to get a Ph.D. She’s been at UT Austin since 2007.
I don’t know if Li was ever in the country on an H-1B visa, but her story is typical of so many other international researchers who come here—she’s smart, hungry and passionate about working on complex problems with the best minds in the world. Those are the type of talented people who help cultivate Abbott’s premier workforce in Texas. Fewer H-1B visa holders means fewer physicists advancing Texas’s semiconductor economy, fewer biomedical researchers at its health centers and fewer top-notch professors in its classrooms inspiring the next generation of innovative leaders.
In September, Trump raised the cost of an H-1B visa to $100,000, making it prohibitive for many colleges to recruit talented researchers. On the back of that decision, economists downgraded their predictions for the country’s economic growth because of the loss of foreign talent. That Texas doubled down on the restrictions by freezing new applications is short-sighted and economically risky. Abbott, up for reelection in November, may have scored a political win by stopping universities from recruiting foreign scholars, but the long-term consequences to the state’s innovation economy could outlast his time in office.