tldr:

Good job helming a trillion-dollar company, Satya. Now let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sources: WSJ and IndiaWest.

Background

On Thursday, JD Vance announced two new initiatives aiming to - depending on your point of view - either crack down on visa abuse or frighten prospective immigrants and their employers. Perhaps both!

Firstly, the White House is blocking Microsoft and seven other companies from applying for green cards for their employees.1 Specifically, these employers have had their participation in the Department of Labor’s Permanent Labor Certification program suspended.

British people love to say that Americans don’t understand irony, but President Trump clearly does. On Thursday, while the vice president scolded Microsoft to “hire great American workers”, the president himself awarded Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Nadella is an Indian immigrant, now an American citizen, who obtained his green card while working at Microsoft.2

Secondly, the Department of Labor is investigating nine universities3 for their handling of the J-1 Exchange Visitor visa, often used by postdoctoral researchers and visiting scholars. These universities are accused of hiring immigrants to undercut the wages of their native-born workers. Subpoenas have been served and universities around the country are on high alert.

We’ll dive into the claims that the administration has made about each of these programs, and see how they hold up.

Microsoft and co. get their PERM suspended

A Primer on PERM

But first: What is PERM? We’ll spare you the details;4 here are the basics:

• PERM is the most common pathway to an employment-based green card.

• To get the certification under PERM, an employer must show that they cannot hire a qualified American to perform a certain job. This justifies moving an immigrant from a short-term visa to long-term permanent residency.

• This is often used to transition workers on an H-1B visa, America’s most popular skills-based visa and a repeated target of the administration, to permanent residency.

Note that in the US, there is no automatic transition to permanent residency after a period of residence; for a person on an H-1B to obtain a green card, they need to either be sponsored by their employer for a green card or marry an American citizen.5 This suspension cuts off employees at these companies from getting green cards.

Why do this? The White House’s rationale boils down to two core claims: that the H-1B is being used to replace American workers with “indentured servants,” and that the employers then abuse the PERM system to obtain green cards for those servants.

Are foreign workers really indentured servants?

It’s always surprising to hear the (otherwise quite anti-immigrant) right worry about the welfare of immigrants, but let’s take them at their word. To what extent does the white-collar employment of foreign nationals resemble6 indentured servitude?

Indentured servitude is a form of labor which - on the spectrum of employment arrangements - is better than slavery, but worse than salaried software engineering.7 In the American context, a typical indentured servant voluntarily entered the contract in exchange for transport to the New World. Upon arrival, they worked for a set period of time, usually 5-7 years, in exchange for passage and food and housing once there.

America owes a great demographic debt to this version of indentured servitude: It’s estimated that nearly half of European immigrants to the 13 colonies were under indentures.

“Classic” indentured servitude typically brings to mind two main features: low or nonexistent compensation, and an inescapable bond to a specific employer. Neither particularly applies when it comes to salaried foreign nationals working in the US.

In general H-1B professionals earn quite well: the median person on an H-1B earns $133k, compared to the median US full-time income of $65k. Poverty, this is not.

There is a (tiny) kernel of truth in the administration’s claims. Six out of the eight firms (e.g., Wipro, Tata) are outsourcing firms that pay relatively poorly, and may be hiring H-1B workers to avoid hiring more expensive American workers. The median employee at these firms still makes more than the US median wage, as they are generally highly educated, but relative to what an American would make with the same education level, they likely are underpaid.

Going after outsourcing companies in general is a worthy goal, and one that the administration has pursued before. However, if this is the primary goal, why include Microsoft and Adobe, which both pay quite well?

If you believe the administration’s numbers, then you might think they have good reason to go after even household name tech companies. Here is JD Vance:

“If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position. If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position.”

This would be a major indictment of the H-1B program if true. But reader, it is not true.

As best we can tell, this $20k calculation comes from a paper by George Borjas showing that “H-1B workers earn 16 percent less than comparable natives”.8 Borjas is perhaps Trump’s favorite economist, because his work consistently finds that it would be beneficial to restrict immigration to the US.

This paper in particular was shown to contain serious data errors. After correcting for these errors, Michael Clemens calculated that H-1B workers actually have a small wage premium compared to comparable US-born workers. Other analyses find that visa holders and US citizens earn roughly similar amounts - certainly not poverty wages.

The second feature of your typical indentured servitude arrangement is extreme dependence on the employer. An indentured servant cannot simply leave. Can H-1Bs?

A first point: An employee on an H-1B can always quit and return to their home country, an option not necessarily available to an indentured servant.

As far as changing employers while in the US: mobility for temporary visa holders is similar to mobility for American citizens. H-1B holders do have to move to another employer that is able to sponsor an H-1B, but this can and does happen. In fiscal year 2025, there were some 68,000 approved petitions to change employers.

During PERM specifically, mobility does decrease. Recent government processing backlogs have ballooned PERM processing times to 1-2 years. Leaving an employer mid-stream means restarting the process from scratch with a new employer. Unsurprisingly, people try to avoid doing this and thus are more likely to stay at the sponsoring job.

So give Vance a C- on the labor mobility point. It is true that during the PERM process, workers move less. But PERM is temporary, and it is a necessary step before a green card. Once they are a permanent resident, they can move jobs freely. If you care about immigrant welfare, do not cut off the path to freedom.

Can you really just advertise jobs in small-town newspapers?

JD Vance had another critique of how these companies handle PERM:

“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers”

Now this sounds ridiculous. Advertising in a print newspaper in the Year of our Lord 2026 surely sounds like a company running circles around the US immigration system.

Would you believe that the reason that companies advertise in print publications is because they are required to do so by federal law? Believe it or not, it’s true. PERM regulations require companies to take out print advertisements informing Americans of available roles, as if senior security engineers find their jobs by reading the Seattle Times.

The administration’s critique here does get at a fundamental problem in the US PERM process. PERM is set up so that you first try to hire an American worker, and then if you’re unable to find one, you can get a green card. This kind of makes sense if your mental model is that companies give a foreigner in India a green card along with their initial job offer.

But in reality, the primary pipeline for international talent is US university → post-grad employment → H-1B → PERM. Microsoft’s own press release says this: “of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people… The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States. They are not new arrivals to our country.”

By the time an employer is applying for PERM for an employee, the employee has already in a position at the sponsoring company, usually for years. Someone else could not do their role!

So yes, the PERM process has real problems. This is the result of poor PERM rules, not a result of Microsoft hacking the system.

J-1 investigations on campus

JD Vance also announced that the Department of Labor would begin investigating nine universities for J-1 visa fraud. The J-1 comes up less often in US immigration discussion than the H-1B. It is a hodgepodge visa which includes many categories of temporary workers: au pairs, summer camp counselors, some physicians, postdocs and exchange students.

Since this press conference only named universities, the admin is clearly concerned about the last two categories: exchange students and research scholars. These are actually not the majority of J-1 visas granted - the two categories combined make up just 18% of all new program participants - but it is clearly where the Trump administration is most concerned about abuse.

Furthermore, it seems likely to me that this investigation is targeting postdoc visas; we’re not sure the Trump administration is that concerned about the 32,000 students who participate in university exchange programs. Postdocs are much more likely to be seeking a job in the US after their postdoc is finished than exchange students.

The nine universities targeted are a bit of an odd combination of schools:

• Harvard

• Yale

• Stanford

• Brown

• University of Pittsburgh

• UC Davis

• Caltech

• Arizona State

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This includes five Ivy+ schools, two large state schools, one small technical university, and the University of Pittsburgh.9 It is not obvious why these nine schools were chosen; the number of foreign postdocs varies substantially among them. Harvard, for instance, sponsored around 3,500 affiliates on J-1s (including those at hospitals) in 2024; Caltech added 135.

Vance’s stated reasoning was that, on average, 38% of workers on federally funded research projects are foreign nationals, while at these universities, it is 61%.

However, that somewhat misses the point. These universities are some of the world’s best. Even Arizona State - the lowest ranked university on the list - is ranked 200th in the world by Times Higher Education. Others are much higher - MIT is 2nd in the world, Stanford 3rd, Harvard 6th and Caltech 7th.

The best universities in the world should attract the best talent in the world. Indeed, they must, if they intend to maintain their premier positions. As such, we would expect places like MIT and Stanford and Caltech to have high percentages of international postdocs.10 This helps the US remain globally competitive. Would we prefer these researchers apply their skills outside the US?

This particularly resonates for Chinese postdocs. The US and China are geopolitical rivals; China hawks would prefer that China do somewhat less science, and the US somewhat more. And, indeed, the J-1 helps achieve that goal. China is the largest source of J-1 research scholars, so this program directly enables Chinese people to contribute to the US economy (rather than to the Chinese economy).

Unlike the PERM announcement, though, the decision here was not to immediately suspend the ability of these universities to sponsor J-1s. Instead the administration has announced an investigation. There will be lawsuits and countersuits, and this will likely drag on for years.

Furthermore, postdocs have an alternative visa pathway. They can generally be sponsored for H-1B instead.11 Using the H-1B pathway comes with its own complications - notably, perpetual worries about a $100,000 fee - but it means that even if implemented, these universities could still have foreign postdocs.

This is thus best seen as a threat - that the administration would like to make employing foreign scientists more difficult and expensive, and make said scientists uncertain about their future in the United States. And this will probably work as a tactic. Some postdocs will likely up sticks and move back to their home countries, unable to live with the uncertainty. Universities will have to fight legal cases and accrue more legal bills; it will be more expensive to hire a postdoc, and on the margin, these universities will probably hire fewer.

It also serves as a warning shot not to piss off the administration. These nine universities are not the nine universities with the most J-1s granted; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UC San Diego, and UT Austin all sponsored more J-1s than Pitt, Arizona State, Caltech, or UC Davis. The list is clearly arbitrarily chosen – that’s the entire point.

Where does this leave us?

The US immigration system is not perfect, and we shouldn’t be complacent about its myriad inconsistencies, and the ways it disadvantages both Americans and foreigners.

But the administration’s actions here are not consistent with a serious attempt to improve American immigration. They are more consistent with using scare tactics to cow political enemies.

Singling out specific companies and universities here is particularly worrisome. It says to any company or university “we can come for you if we’re unhappy with you.”

In the best case, this ends up being a nothingburger. Trump has historically been forced to walk back his immigration actions. Maybe nothing comes of the J-1 investigations, the courts strike down the PERM pauses, and nobody really cares.

In reality though, policies like this have consequences even when they don’t have direct effects. People get scared, students stop coming to the US, and our ability to attract the best talent in the world gets a little bit weaker.

In February 2025, USAID was effectively shut down. Unsurprisingly, most of the attention focused on the immediate humanitarian consequences: health programs, food aid, and emergency response. But something else was happening that received far less attention: major disruptions to science funding and scientific collaboration in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Many programs aimed at supporting researchers in LMICs were paused or cancelled. And major science funders in the U.S. also shifted toward domestic priorities, making international collaboration and support for foreign science more difficult. Given the central role the United States plays in the global scientific ecosystem, these changes have had, and continue to have, far-reaching implications.

As policymakers, funders, and researchers consider what comes next for science in development, a fundamental question arises: what does the evidence actually tell us? Before deciding how to invest scarce resources, we need to understand the returns to supporting science in LMICs, which approaches to strengthening scientific capacity have proven effective, and where the greatest opportunities for impact lie. Just as importantly, we need to understand the limits of our current knowledge and where critical evidence gaps remain.

In this post, we take stock of the economic evidence base. We review what we know about why science in LMICs matters, where scientific activity is taking place, and the policy and funding levers that appear to support the growth of scientific capacity. (Stand by for a future blog where we will discuss what we still really need to understand better.)

Why science in LMICs matters

Science has long been recognized as a key engine of economic and social progress, driving improvements in productivity, health, and technology. But we are learning that investing in science in LMICs can generate especially large returns.

A good example of the research demonstrating this is an evaluation of the rollout of the Embrapa program. In the 1970s, Brazil invested heavily in agricultural R&D through a network of regionally distributed research centers. After the rollout of these public research centers around the country, Brazil transitioned from being a major food aid recipient to one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters. The figure below comes from the paper showing this rapid advance in agricultural productivity in Brazil over the years.

But was this actually because of investments in these R&D centers or something else?

The authors of this paper carefully estimate the causal impact of the rollout of Embrapa centers. As a first step, the authors find that Embrapa scientists were significantly more likely to study their centers’ own local ecological conditions rather than conditions elsewhere. This redirected research effort toward problems most relevant to local farmers in each municipality with an Embrapa center.

So did this increase in research output towards localized problems impact agricultural productivity?

They find that it did. Places with an Embrapa center experienced increases in agricultural productivity, but not only that - the authors also show that places with ecological conditions more similar to those near Embrapa centers experienced larger productivity gains, even when those places were geographically distant from the labs themselves.

Using this ecological exposure advantage of places that did not have an Embrapa center, but benefited nevertheless, the study estimates substantial gains in agricultural productivity. Overall, Embrapa’s research investments are estimated to have increased aggregate agricultural productivity in Brazil by roughly 110 percent, with a benefit-cost ratio of about 17 to 1.

And this pattern is not unique to this program. Across health, agriculture, and scientific publishing, we repeatedly see evidence that relatively modest investments in LMIC science can generate outsized returns, particularly in comparison to investments in science and innovation in higher-income countries, like the U.S. The figure below illustrates additional evidence from prior studies showing the returns per dollar invested in neglected disease R&D and agricultural productivity (top panel - evidence from here, here and here), as well as comparative estimates of the cost of producing an academic publication in LMICs versus the U.S. (bottom panel - evidence from here and here.).

Note. These figures should be taken with a grain of salt, as cross-study comparisons are difficult due to differences in methodologies, outcomes measured, and the scope of R&D returns considered. Nonetheless, they suggest (1) the value of developing more comparable and credible estimates of returns across settings and (2) that even if investments in LMIC science had half the return we see here, they would be a good investment.

Not only are there high returns overall, but science that takes place in LMICs is also important for solving local problems that might not be solved otherwise. Many LMIC challenges are context specific and emerging research has found that what gets researched depends on where researchers are located. Which implies that fewer researchers in some locations would result in less research on issues affecting those places.

One of Caroline’s papers looked at scientific responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Scientists in the affected countries were significantly more responsive during the outbreak than otherwise similar scientists elsewhere. In large part, this was because they had access to the local knowledge, patients, samples, and institutional context needed to do the work quickly.

We are also beginning to accumulate evidence that policymakers, medical professionals, and even patients often place greater trust in locally generated evidence, or evidence that is about populations similar to them, rather than evidence produced elsewhere. So building scientific capacity in LMICs is not just about producing knowledge, it’s also about making knowledge usable.

And finally, science in LMICs produces spillovers that benefit everyone. Research conducted in LMICs contributes to disease outbreak control, agricultural resilience, and climate adaptation globally. Knowledge generated anywhere can diffuse everywhere.

The scale of the imbalance

Despite the clear benefits of LMIC science, global science remains extraordinarily concentrated, and global scientific output remains highly unevenly distributed. The figure below shows that publications per capita are concentrated in high-income countries, and limitations in data availability mean that scientific contributions from many LMICs are difficult to measure accurately.

The same is true for R&D spending.

But one thing that became very obvious while preparing for our May 2026 workshop is how difficult it is to even quantify development-related scientific investment (although we provide some estimates below). Government data on R&D spending in LMICs is difficult to find, as is foreign aid and philanthropic spending in LMIC science and innovation. USAID, for example, reported around $252 million in R&D spending in FY2023. But that number is almost certainly incomplete. The agency spent more than $270 million on evaluations alone that year, some of which arguably qualify as research activity (and some of which may have been reported as part of the $252 million in R&D expenditures - we just don’t know). And even where spending data exists, we often do not know how much of that spending actually supported LMIC researchers directly versus supporting research conducted elsewhere. This data gap matters because it makes serious prioritization extremely difficult.

What seems to matter

Given that right now increasing donor funding for science might be challenging, we can turn to considering the most effective levers for promoting science in LMICs.

Broadly, we organize the evidence on these levers into a few categories: human capital, networks, funding, and institutions/infrastructure.

Human capital

A growing body of research suggests that training and mentorship programs that aim to develop human capital in LMICs matter a great deal for science conducted in these contexts.

One example is a paper studying the Structural Transformation of Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STARS) fellowship program, which pairs African scientists with mentors at U.S. universities. The authors of this paper compared finalists who participated with finalists who narrowly missed out due to mentor availability rather than applicant quality. They found meaningful increases in citations and longer-term scientific engagement among participants.

What stands out from this work is that the benefits are often not purely technical. Trainees consistently emphasize the importance of learning the “hidden curriculum” of science: navigating ethics approvals, publication processes, collaboration norms, grant writing, and professional networks.

Other studies exploring alternative U.S. fellowship structures for foreign scientists (like the Fogarty Scholars and Fellows Program) report positive results as well. Benefits don’t just accrue to the participants, though; they also spill over to the participants’ colleagues.

Networks

Scientific networks may be one of the most underestimated drivers of productivity.

There is growing evidence that internationally mobile scientists help connect researchers in their home countries to global scientific communities. These links facilitate collaboration, information flows, and access to opportunities.

For example, Caroline studies African scientists who participated in the NIH Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP), which supported periods of training in the U.S. She finds substantial spillover effects on the colleagues of trainees who returned home after their training. These spillovers appear to arise because returning trainees acted as bridges between U.S.-based scientists and researchers in their home countries, creating new collaborative connections and closing previously disconnected parts of the scientific network.

Funding

The evidence on the impact of providing financial support directly to scientists, particularly those based in LMICs, remains surprisingly limited. Nevertheless, the existing studies suggest that grants and prizes can substantially increase scientific productivity, with effects that may be especially large in settings with lower initial levels of scientific capacity. For example, a study examining research grants in the USSR finds sizeable impacts on scientific output. As discussed earlier, these effects appear particularly large when compared with estimates of the returns to research funding in the U.S., suggesting that investments in under-resourced scientific systems may generate especially high returns.

Institutions and infrastructure

Lastly, the institutions, incentives and infrastructure supporting scientists appears to matter. A study from the Indonesian context shows that the introduction of publication-linked incentive systems shape the behavior of scientists in very predictable ways, and promote scientific output in the country. And although not evidence from LMICs, recent work has found that access to equipment and open data can dramatically change who is able to participate in science, which gives promising insight into what we might expect if these inputs are made widely available.

This evidence provides a strong starting point, and, if translated effectively into policy and funding decisions, could help unlock substantial scientific and societal benefits. However, we still have major gaps in our knowledge. Much of the existing economic evidence comes from a small number of programs, countries, and interventions, leaving important questions unanswered about what works, for whom, and under what conditions.

In our next post, we’ll explore these unanswered questions and outline a research agenda for understanding how investments in science can most effectively contribute to development, innovation, and problem-solving in low- and middle-income countries.

• You know how suggested you “go forth and export”? The Africa Jobs Fund now has a fellowship to support people building a career in manufacturing in Africa. I would totally do this if I did not have, erm, several other jobs.

• has ideas for metascience experiments.

• Boko Haram finds AI useful in planning terrorist attacks. The security impacts of AI will not only be felt in rich countries…

• The Centre for AI Security and Access summarizes AI philanthropy so far.

• From : data center groups (largely in the US) will consume as much power as entire African countries.

• A New York man was evicted from his apartment for owning too many books. I view this story as aspirational.

• As of 2010, no residents of Manhattan’s Little Italy were born in Italy.

• Chipotle is expanding to Mexico. Love a backported restaurant - there are several Korean restaurants that were started in LA and now have locations in Seoul.

• Three different people have sent me this ad for Kazakhstan:

Do not fear, the algorithm also served it to me.