A new federal policy designed to protect U.S. workers by limiting the number of foreigners hired by universities threatens the country's ability to compete globally in scientific research, educators say.
For decades, U.S. universities have relied on international scientists to carry on essential research in fields such as medicine, the basic sciences and engineering. Like their U.S. colleagues, these foreign nationals are paid less in academia than in private industry.
But a recent change in Labor Department policy often requires universities to pay foreign workers on a wage scale more comparable to private industry. That scale is significantly higher -- in some cases, as much as triple the standard university salary. The change does not affect Americans or legal immigrants who live in the United States permanently.
Labor Department officials say the policy is aimed at preventing employers from having a financial incentive to hire foreign workers over Americans. But educators say the result has been to price universities out of some important research because there are not enough qualified Americans for the jobs and foreigners have become too expensive.
"Our future depends on our technology, and our technology depends on our educational institutions," said Jud Samon, coordinator of international faculty and student services at the University of Maryland at College Park. "If we can't hire the very best people in colleges and universities, that will have a very big impact," he said.
"The quandary in which we now find ourselves defies logic,' William C. Kichardson, who until recently was president of Johns Hopkins University, wrote to Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. The letter also was signed by the presidents of the University of Maryland's three research campuses.
"It is untenable that we be compelled to pay international faculty and staff more than their counterparts who are United States citizens or who already possess valid work permits," the letter stated.
When Sonia Esperanca, 41, a native of Brazil, was hired recently by Maryland's geology department, the university was told to pay her $70,000 a year to run a laboratory that researches the evolution of the solar system. The advertised salary was $27,500 to $32,000. By rewriting the job description three times and cutting her hours from 40 to 38 a week, the university was able to talk the price down to $35,000, which still required raiding other parts of the department's budget.
At Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, which hires about 100 temporary foreign professionals each year and has about 275 such professionals, officials recently stopped paying an Israeli anesthesiologist in training while they decide whether to renew his contract. Under the new policy, he must be paid about $90,000 a year, nearly triple what he is receiving now, officials said.
Maryland universities have been among the hardest hit because the state was one of the first to implement the change, beginning last fall. But the policy has come under sharp attack from dozens of other universities that also have been affected, or soon will be, as the changes are implemented nationwide.
Among them are Harvard University, Dartmouth University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of California, the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University.
Academic institutions are among the employers that seek permission every year from the Labor Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service to hire foreign professionals under a special immigration status that allows them to work in the United States for as long as six years. Known as H-lB, it is one of the few routes that allows foreign professionals to work legally in the United States while seeking permanent residency here.
U.S. law limits the number of such temporary foreign workers to 65,000 a year. Academic institutions usually hire about 20,000 such employees each year, and private industry hires most of the rest. Many universities rely on state employment agencies to calculate the average pay for a job.
The reliance on foreign nationals is driven partly by the international nature of the search for a cancer cure or the latest advances in microchip technology. A second factor is the declining number of Americans pursuing academic careers in science, in part because of higher paying jobs in the corporate sector.
"If you want to make sure there are enough Americans in these fields, you have to start when kids are in kindergarten and first grade and let them know science and research and math are wonderful, fascinating fields," said Catheryn Cotten, international adviser at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. The university hires about 200 temporary foreign professionals each year.
"You don't solve [the problem] today by saying we stop hiring foreign nationals and start hiring Americans who are less qualified just for the sake of hiring Americans,' Cotten said. "Or stop doing the research because there's not enough Americans to do it."
The change stems from a legal ruling last year by an administrative decision-making body under the Labor Department. The decision redefined how state employment offices calculate the prevailing wage -- the average pay for a given area -- when U.S. employers hire foreign nationals.
The policy requires state employment offices to stop distinguishing between the non-profit sector and private sector in determining average salaries. The reasoning is that biochemists at universities are considered to be doing the same research as biochemists at chemical firms and therefore should be paid comparable wages.
But educators say research at universities, where there is greater freedom to conduct investigations, is fundamentally different from research conducted in private industry, where there is increased pressure to produce a product.
Officials at several universities say the new salary rule effectively bars them from hiring foreign nationals because much research is funded through federal grants, which have a limited pool of money. Budget limitations often make it virtually impossible to pay the higher wages that foreign nationals must receive under the new calculations.
Most universities also do not want to pay different salaries to foreign and U.S. workers who are doing similar jobs.
At the University of Maryland at College Park, which hires about 100 temporary foreign professionals each year and has 141 international faculty members and researchers, more than a dozen foreign nationals have been considered for positions in several departments since October. About half of them were not hired because the prevailing wage was too high. In five cases, the departments were able to find extra funds or negotiate lower wages by changing job descriptions. Two other cases are pending.
Esperanca, who was hired to run a geology department lab, is pleased with the higher salary. But she is angry at what she says is the new policy's false assumption that universities hire foreigners because they work more cheaply than Americans. University officials said the top candidate for the job was an American who also had been offered $35,000 -- higher than the advertised limit -- because she had more experience. She turned it down.
Representatives of universities and professional academic associations have been meeting with Labor Department officials to try to resolve the problem. Department officials say they will consider a separate wage category for researchers at academic institutions if educators can provide tangible evidence of differences between work at universities and work in private industry.
"They have to show us they're not the same," said Dennis Gruskin, a senior specialist who works on the issue.