The Trump administration has proposed a new fee for H-1B visas. Officials are also weighing a $100,000 fee on Optional Practical Training. This program allows international graduates to work in the United States for one to three years after completing their degrees. Roughly 419,000 people worked on OPT in 2024. For many participants, the program was a major factor in choosing an American university over schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia.
Yang Zhilin returned to China after earning his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. He interned at Google and Meta and received a job offer from Apple. Instead of taking those paths, Yang wanted to build his own company. The U.S. visa system lacked a way to keep him here for that purpose. Yang went on to establish Moonshot AI. Its Kimi K3 open model has drawn comparisons to models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Some experts propose stapling a green card to every AI Ph.D. diploma. However, this idea and the OPT program both assume that the brightest minds want to work for big tech companies first before building their own ventures. That is no longer the case. Work experience is less relevant when artificial intelligence has accelerated everything. Founders launch companies in their mid-20s straight out of or even before finishing their Ph.D. programs. The population capable of starting a frontier AI company is small. More than two-thirds of these individuals are foreign. That cohort is unlikely to spend five years or more in someone else's company waiting for a green card while watching their idea age out.
Immigrants have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000. This statistic comes from a recent report by the National Foundation for American Policy. The NFAP stated that this high share reflects a greater openness to immigration that helped make the U.S. the leading global destination for research in science and technology fields.
The U.S. immigration system is tightening and slowing down. Beyond the potential $100,000 fee for OPT holders, the post-graduation grace period has been cut from 60 days to 30 days to combat rampant visa abuse. Consequently, students spend the final year of their Ph.D. stressing over finding a job quickly instead of commercializing their ideas. The Trump administration is also trying to end birthright citizenship. Officials even floated barring foreign employees at U.S. labs from frontier-model access before the industry pushed back.
Other nations have noticed these policy shifts and are using them to their advantage. Canada opened a program for U.S. H-1B holders and had to close it within a day because it was oversubscribed. Australia and France are actively running recruitment campaigns aimed at researchers based in the U.S. China launched the Thousand Talents Plan in 2008 and pulled back more than 7,000 people within a decade. China has also increased research funding while the U.S. has cut science funding.
Omar Yaghi was born into a refugee family in Jordan and came to the U.S. as a teenager to study. He shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year. Yaghi recently left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for a position at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He will lead an institute there using AI to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
In September, the U.S. and China are scheduled to hold talks on AI, where chip export control will be a primary topic. Officials will not admit that export controls cannot dictate where a person decides to build a company. Immigration reform will take years, and current damage will be hard to undo. For decades, immigration to the U.S. was a one-way door where people came, stayed, and built. The door swings both ways now. Yang Zhilin and Omar Yaghi are the most visible examples, but they will not be the last.
