Summary

The U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce plays a vital role in fostering and sustaining innovation, economic competitiveness, and national security. This workforce currently depends, and for the foreseeable future will depend, on both international and domestic talent. Foreign STEM talent contributes to domestic innovation, economic growth, and U.S. leadership in science and technology and also expands perspectives and networks essential to future scientific collaborations and discoveries.

While the United States has been the destination of choice for the world’s best and brightest students and scholars since World War II, the market for top scientific talent at all levels has become increasingly competitive (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2020). The rise of talent programs around the globe is one indicator of this competition. Many nations recognize the value of high-skilled STEM talent in the current, increasingly complex, geopolitical environment and have developed and implemented programs to recruit and retain talented individuals from abroad, whether diaspora talent or individuals without existing ties. These programs use incentives to attract talented individuals and often provide predictable pathways to permanent residency or citizenship.

Foreign talent recruitment programs, such as those employed by the Five Eyes¹ and other nations sharing the United States’ values, are

Hosting foreign talent in the United States does present risks—risks that vary by discipline and that policies, procedures, and controls can mitigate but never fully eliminate. However, evidence suggests the benefits posed by foreign talent, open research environments, and international research collaborations and partnerships greatly outweigh the risks (Crane et al., 2021; DHS, 2024a; DOS and ED, 2021; Kerr and Kerr, 2019; Rovito et al., 2021; Watney, 2021; Zwetsloot, 2021). Numerous research security policies have been developed at the federal level and implemented by government, academia, and industry during the past few years (AAU and APLU, 2024; DHS, 2024a; JCORE, 2022). This process continues, as some mandated actions will not take effect until 2025 or later. While these policies were created with good intention, the committee notes the potential they create for administrative burden and the need to implement research security policies in a manner that does not impede the flow and exchange of ideas and talent (Council on Governmental Relations, 2021, 2022; Prabhakar, 2024b).

The committee’s Statement of Task was developed with the U.S. Department of Defense in response to the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (William M. [Mac] Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021; P.L. 116-283, January 1, 2021) and directs the committee to review foreign and domestic talent or incentive programs and their corresponding scientific, economic, and national security benefits. This is in service of recommending ways to improve the effectiveness of U.S. mechanisms for attracting and retaining international students and scholars relative to the programs and incentives other nations use to support national research capabilities, especially in national security and defense-related fields. The committee’s recommendations, developed after receiving input from a variety of key individuals and organizations during open and closed committee meetings, are as follows:

Recommendation 1: The U.S. government, specifically the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), should oversee the coordination of a whole-of-government talent strategy including national talent recruitment and retention approaches for international researchers at all levels of experience to be implemented by federal departments and agencies.

Recommendation 2: The U.S. government, universities, industry, national laboratories, and the broader scientific community should work together to

1. continue to advance the robust international research collaborations and talent flows, including of international students, that are an essential part of U.S. leadership in technology and innovation;
2. insist on openness, transparency, and integrity in these collaborations; and
3. continue to develop guidance and training on research security, research integrity, and international research collaborations.

Recommendation 3: The U.S. government’s approaches for maximizing talent attraction and research collaboration should address national security concerns and risks present in the geopolitical environment.

1. Federal funding agencies should continue to prioritize transparency and consistency as they develop and implement policies on international research collaboration, research exchanges, and assessment tools.
2. Risk should be assessed at the level of individual projects and programs, not by field, subfield, or researcher demographics.
3. Steps taken to increase research security should not restrict or unduly inhibit international collaborations involving fundamental research.
4. The priority in addressing security concerns regarding fundamental research should be ensuring compliance with applicable federal funding agency and institutional policies, rather than prosecution.

Recommendation 4: All levels of government—federal, state, local, and tribal—and key parties in the private sector should take a forward-looking, proactive approach to developing the nation’s domestic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent.

1. Domestic STEM talent development must be recognized as a critical component of the national security innovation base and the overall STEM workforce in educational policy at all levels of government.
2. The barriers preventing equitable access to K–12 and postsecondary education in under-resourced communities must be addressed in order to maximize the development of domestic STEM talent nationwide.

3. Federal science funding agencies should include the development of domestic STEM talent as a key component of their respective missions.
4. Congress should pass legislation modeled on the National Defense Education Act (P.L. 85-864, September 2, 1958) to ensure domestic innovation capacity.

Recommendation 5: The U.S. government should build on its relationships with its trusted allies and develop stronger collaborative partnerships to ensure the resilience of international talent capacity in areas of strategic interest.

Recommendation 6: To facilitate the development and flow of global talent, ensure the robust exchange of ideas, and support the U.S. innovation ecosystem, the U.S. government should support universities, foundations, and industry in forging strong international research partnerships and building educational and research capacity, including in low- and middle-income countries and less developed countries in the Global South.

Recommendation 7: The legislative branch should create easily navigable pathways to permanent residency and citizenship for qualified foreign-born STEM talent. As an immediate priority, Congress should empower government agencies to identify critical areas of science, technology, and engineering vital to their mission. Congress should then authorize additional Green Card numbers for qualified foreign-born experts who work in such areas, subject to normal due diligence. The corresponding legislation should create a new category for permanent residents and should not carry any per-country caps or be subject to existing numerical limitations. Explicit eligibility for international STEM graduates of U.S. institutions should be included.

Recommendation 8: The executive branch should maximize the use of all existing authorities to retain foreign-born STEM experts who are already in the United States.

1. Government departments and agencies should increase the use of their authority as interested U.S. federal government agencies to advise the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and State on applications for permanent residency. The focus of these

1. efforts should be on STEM experts working on research that is aligned with the national interest, including research that is vital to the mission of the respective department or agency.
2. The U.S. Department of Labor should proceed with a new regulation codifying an update to the permanent labor certification process, allowing precertification in certain types of employment. The new regulation should explicitly identify emerging and critical technologies that are in the national interest and where there is a scarcity of U.S. STEM experts.
3. OSTP should monitor and assess the implementation of the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (October 30, 2023), especially provisions related to pathways toward permanent residency in the United States.

Recommendation 9: The U.S. government, specifically OSTP and the Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, Justice, and State, should continue to take measures to address lingering chilling effects of the China Initiative and create an attractive and welcoming environment for domestic and international talent of all races and ethnicities. All efforts should be taken to ensure that programs and policies intended to protect critical research from malign foreign influence do not target or inadvertently discriminate against people on the basis of national origin or ethnicity.

Recommendation 10: To assist Congress and the White House with developing immigration-related policies that support recruiting and retaining international talent, the U.S. government should fund a public-facing national dashboard, potentially run by a federally funded research and development center, that collects and aggregates information and showcases important metrics on international talent to include the following:

1. Educational characteristics of all new lawful permanent residents, whether new arrivals or individuals who adjusted status, to include the highest degree earned, field of study, whether the degree is in STEM, and the country where the highest degree was earned.
2. Characteristics of F-1 student visa and J-1 Research Scholar visa denials, including gender, country of birth, age, major field of

2. study, and whether denial was related to financial support or document integrity.
3. Funding opportunities from the federal government, state governments, industry, and philanthropy for noncitizen STEM experts.
4. Immediate-term stay-rate characteristics of advanced STEM degree holders, identifying how many international students and scholars who obtain a STEM master’s or Ph.D. in the United States or complete a postdoc in the United States, obtain either O-1A, H-1B, or Lawful Permanent Resident status at the 3-year mark after expiration of their underlying F-1 or J-1 status, and providing gender, country of birth, age, and major field of study.
5. Benchmarking against other countries in the competition for new international students at the master’s and doctoral levels in critical STEM fields.

Recommendation 11: Higher education associations, scientific societies, and industry groups and leaders should engage in efforts to educate federal and state policymakers and staff on issues including the importance of foreign talent, the economic competitiveness and national security value of foreign talent, the importance of an open scientific ecosystem, the importance of international research collaborations, the current models for funding research, and current research security issues.

This consensus study report puts forward a set of practical recommendations that government decision-makers and policymakers should seriously consider in order to ensure the continued flow of talent, information, and ideas that is so vital to U.S. leadership in science, technology, and innovation and economic and national security.