Katie Drummond: And particularly at a moment where, as you said, we're in this Cold War with China, we're in this AI arms race. You hear it from the administration, you read about it in WIRED, you hear about it from Sam Altman, other leaders of the AI industry, this like, “We must beat China. We must beat China.” And then stuff like this happens and you feel like, “Let's just hand it to them. Let's just give it to them.” Because we are basically doing that by disincentivizing not only Chinese students, but just brilliant people from all around the world, from coming here, bringing their intellect here, bringing their ideas here. We're basically telling them, “Go somewhere else. Maybe go to China.” And something I did find fascinating in that reporting, Lauren, was that the vast majority of PhD students from China and India actually typically intend to stay in the US after they graduate. While the majority of people from other countries, places like Switzerland and Canada, report actually planning to leave, maybe they want to go back to their home country, maybe they want to go somewhere else, but it's rejecting the people who are most committed to staying here and to contributing to new technology in the United States is a certain kind of choice. And so other countries are already trying to take advantage of that. Hong Kong is already trying to attract Harvard students. The UK is setting up scholarships. There's a lot going on outside the United States in terms of basically trying to make the brain drain happen for us. Our loss is all of their gain. But when you put it in the context of this AI race and the US and China of it all, it feels like what we are doing is distinctly disadvantageous for us in this moment. Unless you both disagree and think I'm missing something.
Lauren Goode: No, we always say on this podcast, it would be nice if we vehemently disagreed with each other because it would create tension. But I think in this case, we are all aligned on this.
Michael Calore: Yeah. This scrutiny over foreign nationals, it doesn't just end at academia, of course. It also extends into the workforce here in the US and work visas. Lauren, you recently reported on how the process to obtain an H-1B visa has become more difficult recently. Can you tell us a little bit about what H-1B visas are and why they matter so much to the tech industry in particular?
Lauren Goode: Sure, yeah. So H-1B visas are work visas that are granted for specialty occupations. They're typically valid for three years. They can be extended in some cases. This type of visa was first introduced in 1990 as part of a broader immigration act. And the idea is that it's supposed to help employers hire people with specialty skills that they might not otherwise get from the talent pool that already exists in the US. And the H-1B is a bit of a controversial visa. Even just saying, so you can hire people outside of the US because there are people who don't have that skill set here, naturally prompts the question for some people, “Wait, why are we not educating and training people in the US to have those jobs?” But basically what I was starting to hear from immigration attorneys who I was speaking to is that the requests for evidence, RFEs, had shot up since Trump took office in January of this year. Typically, when a person is applying or petitioning for an H-1B, their lawyer submits a bunch of paperwork on their behalf and that typically will include résumés, awards, letters of prestige, letters of recommendation from colleagues and friends, and that sort of thing. You basically have to put together this packet to prove that you're worthy of this specialty visa. And then sometimes it would get bounced back and USCIS would ask for more requests for evidence. In this case, a lot of visa applications are being sent back. There are a lot more RFEs or requests for evidence for applicants. And that's something that four different immigration attorneys I spoke to said they're seeing happening. It's also not just happening across H-1B. There's another type of visa called the O-1 Extraordinary Ability visas. Once again, this is a specialty visa. A lot of tech entrepreneurs, engineers, and founders alike will come here under the O-1 visa, and folks in that world are starting to say that they're getting pushback on their applications as well. All of this, it's instilling fear amongst some entrepreneurs and tech workers in the Valley, and it's creating a climate of uncertainty where people who seemed so committed and excited to come here and build their companies here and contribute to the technological environment here are now rethinking that because of what's going on with visa applications.