US Rep. Tom Tiffany’s Bill Targets University Faculty From Abroad

A proposal from a Republican Wisconsin congressman would make it harder for universities to use a work visa program to hire faculty and staff from other countries, while limiting private businesses’ ability to recruit high-demand workers from abroad.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, introduced the Colleges for the American People Act, or CAP Act. It would remove an exemption to the H-1B visa program that allows colleges and universities to use the program without counting toward the cap on the number of visas issued by the federal government for international workers at private businesses.

The bill would make prospective higher education employees go through the H-1B visa application process and compete with applicants in other industries. Tiffany’s office said the bill would not affect current visa holders, and extensions for H-1B employees already at universities wouldn’t count against the cap in the future.

The H-1B visa program is available to citizens of other countries who hold a bachelor’s or higher degree in a field related to the work they will be doing in the United States. It is only open to people working in specialty occupations, said Grant Sovern, a Madison immigration attorney who has spent 30 years working on H-1B visa issues.

“For example, if you have a degree in English literature and you want to do a job, that’s not a specialty occupation — unless you’re going to be an English professor,” he said. “It has to be a computer science degree for a computer engineering position or a medical degree for a physician, that kind of thing.”

The H-1B visa has a cap of 65,000 visas each fiscal year for jobs in the private sector, with another 20,000 for individuals with a U.S. master’s degree or higher, for a total of 85,000 visas annually. H-1B workers employed at colleges and universities and certain research organizations are not subject to the cap.

Tiffany told WPR that the bill is aimed at encouraging universities to educate young people to fill their in-demand jobs instead of “going to people from outside the country.”

“The universities should compete, just like private employers, to be able to bring those people in,” Tiffany said. “The thing I’ve heard is that they’re saying, ‘We sometimes don’t have people that are qualified to be able to do these jobs.’ To me, that’s an indictment of the higher education system.”

The Universities of Wisconsin system employs nearly 500 H-1B visa holders, with salaries totaling almost $43 million annually, according to a spreadsheet the system provided to a conservative media outlet. Individual salaries for those workers ranged from $40,000 to more than $100,000 per year. Some of the job titles were redacted, but many of those visas were held by professors, researchers and scientists.

In a statement, Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson Mark Pitsch said the state university system, like all employers across the country, is competing for talent. He said only about 1 percent of the organization’s more than 43,000 employees used those temporary work visas.

“Critically, these workers help us develop additional talent in Wisconsin at our universities,” he said.

Jon Shelton, a professor at UW-Green Bay and president of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, said the exemption allows American universities to recruit the best and brightest regardless of their home country.

“You need to be able to hire that person who best fits the needs of the academic requirements that a department might be looking for, whether that’s somebody doing research to cure cancer or understand supply chains in the business sector,” he said. “It’s important for us in the UW system to be able to bring in people who are the best fit for the job, and that should include folks from other parts of the world.”

He also said H-1B visa holders aren’t just at UW-Madison or UW-Milwaukee, and they might make up a higher percentage of faculty at smaller four-year schools in the system.

“We have a number of folks at our (UW-Green Bay) campus who I know are on H-1B visas, and many of them are some of our most productive scholars,” Shelton said.

The H-1B visa program is also broadly popular among Wisconsin’s business community. A recent survey of 153 employers from Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobbyist, showed 96 percent of respondents support significantly increasing the annual quotas for employment-based immigrant visas, like H-1B.

And 99 percent of respondents also supported creating new visa options for high-demand workers.

WMC declined to comment on this story. But in an April interview with WPR, WMC President Kurt Bauer said the federal government’s visa system is “antiquated and needs to be updated” because there’s a lot of talent around the world that wants to work in the United States.

“We have a lot of foreign students that are getting degrees in critical areas such as engineering, such as AI, and they would like to apply those skills in the United States, and we don’t give them a visa because we arbitrarily cap H-1B visas at 85,000 per year,” he said at the time.

Sovern said there’s a lottery for H-1B visas and about 300,000 employers are all vying for the 85,000 available slots.

He said making universities compete with businesses for those visas would make it even harder for employers looking for talented workers. He called Tiffany’s bill “counterproductive.”

“It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that is going to move the dial in a positive direction at all,” he said. “I find it interesting that someone who wants to support businesses is saying, ‘We want the government to control the 1 percent of people who you want to hire for this job.’”

Listen to the WPR report

US Rep. Tom Tiffany’s bill would make it harder for universities to hire faculty from abroad was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.