Dr. Muhil Ravichandran earned a PharmD from Rutgers University and had a job at a cancer research company. She has lived legally in America for almost her entire life and is a model immigrant. Yet because of America’s broken immigration system, she could be forced to leave her home and take her much-needed talents elsewhere.

Ravichandran first legally came to the USA with her family when she was two years old, and settled permanently in the US by age nine. But when she became an adult she was no longer covered by her family’s legal status. Upon graduation from college, she was forced to turn to the vagaries of the green card system.


There are categories of green cards for those with advanced degrees that she could have qualified under, yet the wait period for those with Indian citizenship is measured in multiple years, decades, or even—as David Bier once calculated—more than a century. Recent college grads don’t have 151 years (!) to wait.

So she got a job at an oncology company—in a non-research role—and her employer entered her name in the H‑1B visa lottery, a highly competitive sponsored category. But last year there were ~484,000 applications for only 85,000 H‑1B slots, meaning that Ravichandran’s chance of success was roughly 18%. Unfortunately, she was one of the 82% who was rejected.


And because of that rejection, she has already lost her job. She could have to move out of the US and try to apply again in the future. And if she applied under another category, like an EB‑3 green card, she might make it back in 17 years give or take. But at that point, she may have put down roots in another, more serious country that isn’t so determined to shoot itself in the foot. She could stop applying altogether and the US would be worse off as a result.

The sheer unnecessity of it all drives me crazy. Ravichandran is going to go through substantial personal trauma for what? In what conceivable universe is not allowing her to reside in the US in our national best interest??

Muhil isn’t herself a research scientist, but many of her cohort of documented dreamers—children of immigrants caught in a kind of legal limbo—are. Imagine if we found out that a terrorist state, say North Korea, was kidnapping cancer scientists—it’s a less unbelievable scenario than you might think—from America to burnish its medical science capabilities. We’d be outraged! It would be a clear blow to our national self-interest to allow another nation to pilfer our top researchers. We’d might go to war over such an act, charge those who aid and abet the kidnappings with treason, and so on.

Yet America’s policymakers are doing worse than that *themselves*! We’re forcing top scientists, medical researchers, and entrepreneurs to leave by the hundreds of thousands every year. It’s insanity! We should be begging people like Ravichandran to stay, not making her pray not to have to leave.

And it’s not just a zero sum transfer. American research clusters are among the best in the world. They have better access to capital than elsewhere. We’re the global leader in biomedical research because we (still, for now at least) attract top global talent and investment. The simple truth is that researchers are less likely to be as productive working in an Indian lab as in an American one. That’s a deadweight loss for humanity.

We already dodged one such bullet with vaccine research. Katalin Kariko, the mother of mRNA vaccine technology, was nearly forced out of the US twice: once because of hangups with a spousal visa for her husband, and a second time because of how easy it was for an angry boss to use employment visa restrictions to punish her for leaving his lab. Just think of the deadweight loss that humanity would have suffered if Katalin hadn’t developed mRNA technology to the point of commercial application, hadn’t had access to the American venture capital needed to start up BioNTech, and thus hadn’t played a vital role in the development of mRNA covid vaccines. In an only slightly alternate universe, Katalin Kariko is forced back to Hungry by dumb US immigration policies, a change that leads to thousands or even millions more lives lost in the pandemic. Usually the term “deadweight loss” isn’t quite so literal…

And with Ravichandran—and many other documented dreamers—we’re talking about people who are facilitating the work of cancer researchers. Right now we are making incredible strides with cancer vaccines and treatments coming down the pipeline—melanoma! lung! breast! glioblastoma! prostate! colorectal!—but the biggest bottleneck (other than the FDA) is the lack of researchers and supporting personnel. Excluding these high skill workers means American companies will conduct fewer cancer studies at higher expense and on a longer timescale than otherwise would be the case. As a result, there will be people who unnecessarily die from cancer because we were months, years, or decades slower to do the research that could have saved them.

What should we do? The most obvious reform is to systematically raise the H‑1B visa cap. That’s what other countries are currently doing to take advantage of American immigration idiocy and poach talent. Canada created a new, more flexible variation on the employment visa while also generally liberalizing its immigration laws, and it’s already been a boon to Toronto’s “Maple Valley.”

This content was crossposted from the author’s Substack.