Vice President JD Vance stood at the podium for a press conference this week and announced investigations into America’s top universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, MIT and others — for the purported offense of attracting the top global talent to its research and study programs.
“Elite universities bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents,” he said. On the same day, Vance also announced the suspension of tech giants Microsoft and Adobe from the H-1B visa program, warning that American companies cannot “replace” U.S. workers with foreign “servants.” Earlier this month, he came out against the H-1B visa entirely, saying he would be “very supportive of just eliminating it.”
Vance framed all of this as a defense of the American worker. It is the exact opposite.
Vance framed all of this as a defense of the American worker. It is the exact opposite.
It is a plan to make America lose the future at a time of critical and fast-paced change in science, technology and more.
Let’s put the culture wars to the side and start with what those nine universities have actually been over the past century: the single most effective talent magnet any nation has ever built. The foreign graduate students Vance wants investigated are responsible for 24% of U.S. billion dollar companies. They are why much of the research that produced modern artificial intelligence happened in American labs instead of somewhere else. Ever heard of a company called Moderna? It was founded by Noubar Afeyan, who came to MIT as an international Ph.D. student from Canada, of Armenian heritage. The company now employs over 4,400 people in the state of Massachusetts alone. America did not dominate the previous era because we grew all of our own geniuses. We dominated because we imported everyone else’s, too.
As a Yale alumnus, former venture capitalist and tech-oligarch errand boy, Vance knows this all extremely well. As he inevitably preps for a 2028 presidential run, he has apparently decided it doesn’t matter — because the people driving much of the innovation have the wrong lineage and American workers left behind by his own administration need someone new to point the finger at. Even his boss, President Donald Trump, famous for embracing white nationalists, has conceded the point. Trump said plainly last year that the country has to bring in foreign expertise and that Americans do not have “certain talents,” that “people have to learn.” Notably, Elon Musk, the man who ran the administration’s own efficiency effort (to dubious results), came to this country via South Africa first on a student exchange visa from Canada in the late ’80s before transitioning to an H-1B in the ‘90s.
When it comes to stifling American companies like Microsoft in preventing them from recruiting top talent, consider the timing. That is what should most alarm anyone who wants to see our country win the future. We are in the opening years of a bitter competition with China over AI-dominance that will set the terms of the global power dynamic for the rest of our lives. China has responded to MAGA attacks on the H-1B program by building its own visa programs specifically to catch the talent we turn away. You couldn’t think up a better gift to a rival world power if you tried.
Vance is telling the next generation of the world’s best minds to take their “genius” to a country that wants it. And China does.
As someone who has spent 10 years studying at Brown, Yale and Harvard, I can tell you firsthand that the people doing the hardest work in the room were, more often than not, the ones who had crossed an ocean to be there. The students who had given up seeing their family for years to study, to learn, to invent. Those were not people undercutting America. They were people who bet everything on it.
Vance is telling the next generation of the world’s best minds to take their “genius” to a country that wants it. And China does. In making these outrageous claims, Vance is choosing to play to a MAGA base that would rather be resentful than dominant.
But America cannot lead globally by slamming our door on the world’s best and brightest. That is the real cost here, and it may not show up for a decade — when the next breakthrough that should have happened here in an American lab happens somewhere else instead.
The post JD Vance’s visa crackdown will sabotage America’s future appeared first on MS NOW.
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