Report: The Dangerous Rise in Foreign Workers in American Universities

Introduction

This report provides evidence of the link between growing foreign employment in higher education and a higher number of protests following the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Those protests promoted a variety of radical agendas, including socialist and Islamist arguments against America, Israel, and Jews.

Colleges and universities do not face the same barriers to hiring foreign labor as for-profit companies do. For example, for-profit companies like Google or Amazon can only hire foreign employees by winning a lottery for H-1B visas, which are limited to 85,000 per year. Universities face no limit to how many H-1B workers they can hire. This unfettered access to hiring non-citizens has made universities an attractive vehicle for foreigners seeking end-runs around immigration laws so they can enter and stay in the U.S. The dramatic increase in foreigners working in higher education, particularly among selective universities, has also fundamentally changed the priorities of those institutions. They have increasingly adopted global perspectives that are indifferent or even hostile to American interests.

In 2024–25, undergraduate and graduate students received $275.1 billion in federal aid “from all grants, federal loans, tax credits, and federal work-study” programs. Given that universities are the beneficiaries of these and other forms of direct and indirect subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, the disconnect of values and priorities between higher education and the American public is unsustainable. Realigning the interests of universities and the taxpayers and voters who subsidize them will require reining in the growth of foreign labor hired by universities.

To be sure, foreigners can contribute valuable energy and skill to U.S. universities, but this report will show that, at higher concentrations, they can also steer universities away from American interests. Avoiding excessive concentrations of foreign workers in higher education involves imposing caps on the number of those who can be hired, like the caps for-profit companies already face. Those caps strike a balance between harnessing foreign talent to help American organizations and upholding American interests. Corporate America has managed to thrive with caps on hiring foreign labor, and American universities could do the same.