Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that he is tasking the Florida Board of Governors with “pulling the plug” on the use of H-1B visas at public universities and colleges.
The visas allow U.S. employers to temporarily hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations.
Moving forward, the governor said, he only wants the universities and colleges to employ American workers.
DeSantis said there’s no reason why Florida’s higher education institutions can’t find the same talent from within their recent graduates, or from around the country.
The proposition
At a press conference in Tampa DeSantis read off a list of university jobs held by staff with H-1B visas. The jobs included professors, engineers and designers.
“An assistant swim coach from Spain on an H-1B visa. Are you kidding me? We can’t produce a swim coach in this country?” DeSantis asked. “Bioanalytical core director from Poland, a psychologist and counselor from the United Kingdom, graphic designer from Canada, all on an H-1B visa.”
DeSantis called the H-1B visa program a scam, claiming that American workers are being fired from university positions, or not even being hired because of foreign workers.
“This is not like you're taking an Einstein and you're bringing an Einstein from a foreign country to teach all these great things," DeSantis said. “First of all, you wouldn't even use an H-1B visa for that. You would use an O visa for that. So that these are not like super, this is basically, in some respects, cheap labor that they're bringing in to try to save money.”
“We need to make sure our citizens here in Florida are first in line for job opportunities,” DeSantis said. “And if there's things that the universities need that somehow they just can't find in Florida, to me, of all employers, they are the ones that would be most responsible for why they can't find what they need."
Watch the governor’s press conference here on H-1B visas:
University pushback
United Faculty of Florida statewide president and University of Central Florida professor Robert Cassanello said this will be difficult to do, at least in the short term.
“There are just not enough candidates to fill certain professor positions, especially in the hard sciences and engineering,” Cassanello said. “We just don't have students coming through who are interested and are well trained, oftentimes, in the sciences and engineering.”
The universities have to look elsewhere, he said. “The other issue is, who's the best qualified for the position, right? So it's a question of merit, and sometimes you do a search, and it just happens that the best person in the candidate pool is a scholar that's overseas.”
Cassanello said that, if Florida universities and colleges stop hiring through H-1B visas, it’s going to hurt the very fields that Florida is trying to put more of an emphasis on in its university system.
“Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee are pressuring colleges and universities to beef up their hard sciences, their engineering, their programs that they think create instant careers for students,” Cassanello said. “I don't know, but attacking H-1B visas is also going to attack those same programs, and they're going to drive off the professors teaching those programs.”
At the press conference with DeSantis was interim University of Florida president Don Landry. His university is one of the largest employers of H-1B visa workers.
He said he could understand why, in some cases, H-1B visas are necessary.
“We only have 2% international students at UF, okay, but we educate them like we educate everybody else, and occasionally some bright light might be good enough for the faculty, and then we will try and retain the person into whom we've invested so much,” Landry said. “But that's kind of the exception that proves the rule.”
Otherwise and in most cases, Landry, who worked at Columbia University before coming to Florida, said he backs the governor’s push to do away with H-1B workers.
“I know from personal experience at another institution and experience with colleagues at other institutions, and we know that H-1B is not handled in a pristine fashion, even in academia, certainly not in business. So we endorse the review of H-1B. We are conducting our own now,” Landry said.
Over the last five years, 2,589 H1-B visa sponsorships were acquired for university workers in Florida.
