A crackdown on the visa program “could set back research, including the treatment of cancer,” industry executives tell Bloomberg.
Add the $324 billion US biotech industry to the list of groups is opposed to the Trump administration’s crackdown on the H-1B visa program.
Bloomberg reports that, from “tiny startups to global giants,” biotech companies “are increasingly alarmed as President Donald Trump considers following his controversial travel ban with restrictions on skilled foreign immigrants.”
The industry rely on “the world’s best scientists and lower-level researchers” to “crank out discoveries” and a “crackdown on visas for these workers could set back research, including the treatment of cancer,” the agency reported.
Here’s more from Bloomberg:
“There’s a real crisis of science going on in this country,” said Cedric Francois, chief executive officer of Apellis Pharmaceuticals, a startup based in Crestwood, Kentucky, that is working on immune-therapy drugs. About half of Apellis’s staff come from abroad, largely brought in on the kind of visas, called H-1B, that allow temporary residence for skilled foreign workers.
To put the industry’s need for foreign workers in context:
U.S. bioscience firms employ about 1.7 million people, according to an industry-backed study, including a rising number of foreigners. Fewer than half of biomedical scientists in the U.S. in 2014 were native-born citizens, according to the journal Nature, and a third were non-citizens. Meanwhile, thousands of foreign scientists travel to the U.S. every year for specific projects.
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