PRESS RELEASE: DFI Report Sheds New Light on Foreign Influence in Higher Ed, Recommends Limiting Foreign Student and H-1B Worker Visas

Report finds higher concentrations of foreign workers in higher education are associated with more anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic campus protests

WASHINGTON—The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) today released a new report by Senior Fellow Jay P. Greene, “The Dangerous Rise in Foreign Workers in American Universities,” exposing how America’s higher education system has become an uncapped pipeline for foreign labor and how that pipeline is contributing to a dangerous rise in anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic sentiment on college campuses.

The report demonstrates how colleges and universities, unlike private-sector employers, face no cap on the number of H-1B foreign workers they can sponsor. As a result, higher education has become an attractive vehicle for foreign nationals seeking to enter and remain in the United States.

“Foreign students and workers can make valuable contributions to American universities, but when their numbers become excessive, they can alter the priorities and culture of those institutions,” said Greene. “As a result of the growing number of H-1B visa holders on college campuses, campus culture has too often become disconnected from American values and interests and the needs of the students they serve.”

According to the report, the total number of people in the United States with F-1 student visas increased by 75 percent between 2008 and 2024, from 671,616 to 1,177,766. Nearly all of that growth came from foreign graduate students, whose enrollment increased by 83 percent over the same period. At elite universities, foreign students now make up more than one-third of total enrollment and nearly half of graduate enrollment.

The report also finds that the number of newly approved H-1B visas sponsored by colleges and universities remained relatively stable from 2010 to 2021, averaging 11,305 annually, before jumping sharply after 2022. From 2022 to 2025, colleges and universities sponsored an average of 15,810 newly approved H-1B visas each year, which is a 40 percent increase.

The report also identifies a striking association between foreign labor in higher education and radical campus protest activity following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel. Using data from the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University, Greene examined 2,331 protests in 831 American cities or towns between October 7, 2023, and December 31, 2024, involving university groups opposing Israeli or American actions related to Gaza. The report then compared those protests with H-1B approvals for colleges and universities in the same jurisdictions.

The findings are significant:

Cities with fewer than 50 H-1B workers at universities averaged 1.0 protest during the period examined. Cities with 50 to 99 H-1B university workers averaged 9.5 protests. Cities with 150 to 199 H-1B university workers averaged 26.2 protests. And cities with more than 300 H-1B university workers averaged 67.3 protests.

The report does not claim that the H-1B data proves causation, but it argues the strong association should prompt policymakers to seriously consider whether excessive concentrations of foreign workers in higher education are contributing to the spread of radical, anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic ideologies on campus.

“Universities should be places where ideas are debated, tested, and challenged, not institutions where students are intellectually disarmed by faculty and graduate instructors with little commitment to American values and interests,” said DFI President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel. “The federal government has a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer-subsidized universities are not using immigration loopholes to remake themselves into institutions that are hostile to the very republic that sustains them.”

The report recommends several possible policy solutions, including:

• Applying a 15 percent cap on foreign enrollment to all students, not just undergraduates;
  
• Pausing approval of new H-1B visas for universities while long-term reforms are considered;
  
• Setting a cap on the total annual number of H-1B visas available to colleges and universities (similar to the cap for for-profit companies); and/or
  
• Requiring universities to compete with for-profit companies for the same limited pool of H-1B visas.

“The recommendation of this report is not to eliminate foreign students or foreign workers from American universities,” Greene writes. “It is to rein in foreign enrollments and labor so universities once again serve the interests of American students, taxpayers, and the country as a whole.”

Read the full report here.