From tiny startups to global giants, the companies that sustain the $324 billion U.S. biotech industry are increasingly alarmed as President Donald Trump considers following his controversial travel ban with restrictions on skilled foreign immigrants.
To crank out discoveries, U.S. biotech firms such as Amgen Inc. and Gilead Sciences Inc., as well as overseas companies with stateside operations, rely on the world’s best scientists and lower-level researchers with expertise that is hard to find.
A crackdown on visas for these workers could set back research, including the treatment of cancer, executives said. It also comes as companies, hospitals and universities struggle with the aftermath of Trump’s immigration ban from seven Muslim-majority countries, which has for now been blocked in court.
"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.
"Most if not all of our people who are on a green card started off on an H-1B," said Francois, who is Belgian. "Including me."
The Trump administration is considering changes to the scope of the H-1B program, one of the main routes through which U.S. employers sponsor skilled staff for immigration, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters last week.
The administration may push to require companies to try to hire Americans first, and make it more difficult for lower-paid roles to qualify for the visas, "in order to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest," according to a draft executive order seen by Bloomberg. So far, no such changes have been announced, and the White House hasn’t confirmed any details. Broader changes might require an act of Congress.
Will court’s ruling on travel ban change Trump’s approach to governing? Noah Bierman and Brian Bennett
When other presidents were dealt the kind of jolting setback that President Trump received from the courts this week, they learned from those moments to alter their approaches to the job.
Trump, however, has a history of stubbornness and a self-proclaimed mission to upend almost everything his…
When other presidents were dealt the kind of jolting setback that President Trump received from the courts this week, they learned from those moments to alter their approaches to the job.
Trump, however, has a history of stubbornness and a self-proclaimed mission to upend almost everything his…
(Noah Bierman and Brian Bennett)
Politicians in both parties, as well as labor unions, have criticized the H-1B program because they say it lets companies undercut American wages. Some Democrats have also sought to restrict H-1B visas, including through a bill introduced by U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California. For companies most heavily dependent on the program, the legislation would raise, to more than $130,000, the minimum pay that allows the employers to avoid the most stringent regulations.
Read More: Why H-1B Tech-Worker Visas Press Trump’s Buttons
India-based outsourcing firms, such as Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., are among their largest users. Silicon Valley giants including Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. are also major H-1B sponsors, and have lobbied for years to make the category more flexible.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller defends travel ban, advances false voter fraud claims Philip Rucker
The White House is pursuing several options to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban on all refugees and travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, fighting back against what one top adviser on Sunday called “judicial usurpation of power.”
White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller…
The White House is pursuing several options to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban on all refugees and travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, fighting back against what one top adviser on Sunday called “judicial usurpation of power.”
White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller…
(Philip Rucker)
The Trump administration didn’t respond to requests for comment. Trump has said it’s necessary to restrict travel from the seven countries because of the risk of terrorism.
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.
The chief executives of two companies with U.S. operations, Roche Holding AG, Europe’s largest drug-maker, and London’s AstraZeneca Plc, assailed the restrictions.
"Science doesn’t have any borders, so anything that gets in the way of a borderless science exchange doesn’t help,” said Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, which has U.S. headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, and research and manufacturing sites in Massachusetts and Maryland. "We want to be able to move our people and our scientists around the world.”
Trump’s first executive order on immigration gave companies an early hint of what could become broader struggles. At Monrovia, California-based Xencor Inc., which works on drugs for immune diseases and cancer, one employee had to cancel a trip for fear of being stranded and another abandoned hope of a visit from an elderly relative overseas, according to CEO Bassil Dahiyat.
Xencor relies on its non-American staff, Dahiyat said: "I can think of several off the top of my head who are absolutely pivotal."
Olivier Elemento, a computational biologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, runs a cancer systems lab where two researchers have H-1B visas. The lab works on computational biology, where researchers analyze complex patient gene data to help find targets for new precision drugs — an approach that has led to recent breakthroughs.
"Our research would suffer without a doubt,” Elemento said. "A lot of discoveries we would make maybe wouldn’t happen."
The immigration battle marks the second between drugmakers and the president. Last month, Trump accused the companies of "getting away with murder" by charging high prices for medicine and threatened to use the purchasing muscle of the federal government to drive costs down.
While the pricing debate has cooled, much of the medical industry is now up in arms over the immigration issue. In a commentary published Feb. 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine, top doctors at seven major medical centers, including the Harvard University-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote that policies preventing "the best from coming to train and work" will harm "America’s position as a world leader in health care and innovation."
On Tuesday, more than 160 industry executives, scientists, and investors signed a letter to the journal Nature Biotechnology condemning Trump’s earlier travel ban as a "misguided" threat to both liberty and innovation.
Medical leaders point to the central role of foreign doctors in the kinds of crises Americans fear. When the Boston Marathon bombings tore the city apart almost four years ago, a Greek doctor led Massachusetts General’s response: George Velmahos, chief of trauma surgery.
Mass General and its affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital have 100 people with visas from the seven countries targeted by Trump’s order, according to Katrina Armstrong, Massachusetts General’s physician-in-chief.
"We brought them here because we thought they had the talent to make the country a better place," Armstrong said. "These are people who couldn’t be more dedicated to preventing violence and saving lives."
–With assistance from Caroline Chen Julie Edde Robert Langreth John Ainger James Paton and Shannon Pettypiece
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
