The terrible academic job market implies that there should be an oversupply of qualified potential faculty members in many fields. One would expect that many American citizens with the appropriate training and other qualifications are unemployed, and that the opportunities for colleges and universities of all kinds to hire them would be plentiful and easy. But lately in our searches we have encountered an unusual situation: Many of our strongest applicants have not been American citizens. We have recently hired a noncitizen, and our current pools suggest the real possibility that we will do so again.
While we are excited about the opportunity to bring diverse qualifications, experiences, and perspectives to our faculty—which hiring international colleagues certainly does—at the same time we recognize that we have some level of ethical obligation to U.S. citizens, an obligation that is recognized and codified in the rules for hiring noncitizens at our institution. These rules are troublesome in many ways, however. For example, if we conduct a search and a noncitizen emerges as the strongest candidate, we have to demonstrate that “no qualified American” was available to accept the job. The level of proof for this demonstration is pretty high, and, unfortunately, it sometimes calls for a sort of charade search of the type that is objectionable to anyone who cares about running ethical searches.
Thus, even though we have conducted a full national search, identified the available candidates, interviewed those who seem to be the most appropriate, and selected one, if this person is seeking permanent residency or does not already have the right kind of work visa, we have to start over again, readvertise the job, and move forward from there. In the meantime, the person we have hired has started to work for us. We have invested in him or her, and in return, he or she has invested in us. Depending on how rigorously we are advised to advertise the job again, we may receive further applications. And any advertising and other search ancillaries, of course, incur added costs.
I understand fully that there are good reasons for preferring to hire American citizens in most cases. Moreover, the United States has made a series of public-policy decisions that drive us in that direction whether we want to go that way or not. While there are also very strong reasons to hire international faculty, I do not dispute the priority on hiring citizens.
But once we have run an honest search and the outcome has been that the best candidate is a noncitizen, mandating a subsequent process that requires a potential betrayal of that new colleague, the possible misleading of a whole new pool of applicants, and a substantial amount of additional institutional expense seems dysfunctional to me.
The original search, conducted properly and appropriately documented, should be a prima-facie demonstration of the fact that the noncitizen was the best-qualified candidate for the job. To require us to repost the ad, and essentially start over, is wasteful and dishonest, and doesn’t reflect the way the United States should aspire to do business.
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12 Responses to Hurdles to Hiring International Faculty
rcatmur - December 10, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Welcome to the unrealistic and archaic world of the Department of Labor (DoL). DoL governs most of the regulations pertaining to the hiring of non-U.S. citizens, however their comprehension of the realities of job markets, advertising, recruitment, and wage levels is woefully inadequate. Academic immigration services offices struggle with these requirements and their impacts on university and college departments on a daily basis. We can only hope for procedural and policy revisions on the part of DoL — though after years of this – that hope is waning.
Robin C.
Large Public University.
22042225 - December 10, 2010 at 5:06 pm
I thought there was an exception to the “no otherwise qualified” American when specialized positions such as professors were being hired. But I have also noticed a remarkable lack of clear and precise guidance on how to conduct these searches from the beginning to avoid the “faux” search later.
wdabc - December 11, 2010 at 12:12 am
I doubt that many foreign professors are more qualified than American educated Ph.D.s. Given the current unemployment statistics and the excessive and abusive use of American adjuncts, I really don’t care.
If you will do a more thorough search of international acts of plagiarism, embeselment, sexual abuse, etc. you will find that the “great foreign mind” may have a serious misconduct record which should exclude him/her from any further consideration.
Foreign universities do a good job of publicly blackballing, on the internet, the conduct of their scholars. Do your homework.
theblondeassassin - December 13, 2010 at 6:05 am
@wdabc
Many top scholars in the US have been from other countries — check out any list of Nobel prizewinners, for example.
Would you apply the same reasoning about having been blackballed to overseas universities’ hires of US-born faculty members?
softshellcrab - December 13, 2010 at 1:17 pm
This should be against the law. The article states: “…lately in our searches we have encountered an unusual situation: Many of our strongest applicants have not been American citizens. We have recently hired a noncitizen, and our current pools suggest the real possibility that we will do so again.”
That’s horrible. We should give strong, very strong, preference to hiring our fellow Americans. We do in my department. Why hire foreigners when our fellow Americans need jobs? And by the way many have poor communication skills in a communication profession. But even that is not the point. We should favor Americans just because they are our fellow Americans. No further justification is needed.
cherylgilman - December 13, 2010 at 4:26 pm
It seems the writer’s institution has created an unfortunate hurdle beyond the already-obstructive U.S. immigration laws.
I am the visa/greencard point person at a large institution known for internationalization. My job is made easier in that my institution recognizes that we have a duty to our faculty and our student body to hire the best. Period. Hence, the institution itself does not put up artificial obstacles beyond the law.
There is no requirement in U.S. immigration law that the employer demonstrate that no U.S. workers were available to take the job in order for them to hire a foreign national to work in the USA as a nonimmigrant (temporary visa holder, such as an H-1B).
It baffles me that some responders here think it’s a bad thing for universities to hire the most qualified candidates, and that U.S. workers of lesser qualifications should get preference. I guess those institutions care more about appeasing some kind of short-sighted fear-oriented patriotism than creating a culture of excellence. Granted – some public institutions may have specific mandates, however these need to be tested if they verge on discriminatory practice.
There are plenty of studies showing that one H-1B professional = dozens of U.S. jobs. This is true in academe as well as private industry. Without a few “brains from overseas”, we could not have created cutting-edge research opportunities for thousands of post-docs and researchers in emerging fields.
Often fields of inquiry are are born overseas – so why shouldn’t we be able to bring the people who are most expert here to teach our students about tomorrow’s technologies? Tomorrow’s jobs? Why wouldn’t we want to attract top, forward thinking students that want to study with THESE people?
In the business of seeking to expand knowledge, it seems most productive to keep the scale HUMAN, rather than NATIONAL. We are not seeking to test the boundaries of national knowledge, are we?
david_r_evans - December 13, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Cheryl, thanks. It’s not that the institution puts up additional barriers, but that we don’t have an industrial-sized enterprise office to handle employee immigration matters. We have exactly four international faculty (in a total of around 80), so we don’t have the expertise to manage these issues internally and thus have to outsource them. Also, we’re not necessarily after H-1B status, but green cards, without which making a tenure-track hire doesn’t mean much.
I do agree completely about the rest of it. Moreover, our international faculty all have American Ph.D.s, so presumably they’re just as qualified, at the baseline, as Americans with the same Ph.D.s.
For softshellcrab, in addition to cherylgilman’s excellent points, there’s also the point that you can’t hire qualified Americans if Americans don’t apply. You can’t seriously argue that in a job that requires a Ph.D., you’d prefer to hire an American citizen with a master’s degree than a non-citizen with a good Ph.D.
Wdabc, what a strange, paranoid world you inhabit.
softshellcrab - December 16, 2010 at 2:15 pm
@ cherylgilman and david-r-evans
Cheryl writes “It baffles me that some responders here think … that U.S. workers of lesser qualifications should get preference. I guess those institutions care more about appeasing some kind of short-sighted fear-oriented patriotism than creating a culture of excellence.
Or…., Cheryl…, we simply care about our fellow Americans. Really, Cheryl, is that how you view it? When for Heaven’s sake did standing up for our fellow Americans become evil and a target for derision? And what the heck is all that about, your phrase “short-sighted fear-oriented patriotism”? What’s that mean? You sound like someone who, frankly, seems to find “patriotism” something to mock. What you deride as “short-sighted fear-oriented patriotism”, I merely term as “patriotism”, or a desire to watch out for, and help, my fellow Americans. Why, for heaven’s sake why, do you treat that as a dirty word or an evil concept?
When did we get to the point in this country that a belief in helping our fellow Americans gets us mocked by the intelligencia in academia?
And why, Cheryl, does hiring Amerians work against “a culture of excellence”? Gee whiz.
To David Evans, your comment that “You can’t seriously argue that in a job that requires a Ph.D., you’d prefer to hire an American citizen with a master’s degree than a non-citizen with a good Ph.D.” seems misplaced and, I would argue, irrelevant. Okay, I wouldn’t. When did I say I would? If we need a Ph.D., we need a Ph.D. What’s your point, big guy? What does that have to do with the price of rice in China? I am saying if there is a qualified American we should favor them. Not necessarily hire them “no matter what”, but certainly favor them. You, like Cheryl, seem to view it as almost an evil, right-wing, xenophobic thing to favor Americans in hiring for these plum professor jobs. I just don’t get your attitude. David, if you are an applicant for a job at my school, and if it’s it at all arguably close, I am going to give a preference to helping you, and thus your lovely family also, over a foreign person. Even as you would apparently plan to mock my help, I would still help. I want YOUR kids to have a dad with a good job, or YOUR wife to have a husband with a better job. I owe a duty to watch out for you as my fellow American.
In other forums here I read about liberal arts professors who lament how impossible it is to get a job as a tenure track professor. Why shouldn’t we favor Americans for good jobs at American universities? Let’s not add to their burden by indiscriminately hiring foreign natinals over them with no thought to watching out for our fellow countrymen. What is going on here, when that attitude inspires such derision?
doubleblind - December 16, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I am an international faculty member, and I was hired because I was the best person for the job who didn’t turn it down. But I wasn’t the only qualified person.
Not having been born American (or English, Swedish, French, etc.), I live in a very different world (regardless of where I physically reside). The birth lottery has already put non-US citizens at a lifetime of hurdles that Americans can never know and will never know. If an American and a foreigner have equal qualifications, having gone through way tighter hoops to get there, the foreigner is necessarily the better-qualified candidate.
Plus, Americans always have other career options; people from the third world do not have nearly the variety, whether they live here or back there.
If anyone would like me to elaborate on some of this, I can.
By the way, do not assume our communication skills are lower. I taught English composition and grammar to American college students for years; no one finds an accent in the way I speak; in my first few months in the US, my fellow dorm dwellers all wanted me as their spellchecker—I was better than the Apple II.
normative_ - January 3, 2011 at 7:55 am
I speak from the perspective of the social sciences, but the observations probably apply universally.
When we hire staff, we’re looking for those who will help us grow as an institution. We are looking for candidates who will attract grant money that is badly needed and isn’t easy to secure. They have to master the field, they must be able to take the field to the next level with their theoretical insights and their empirical research, they must be capable of attracting top-drawer Ph.D. candidates, they must be well-connected, and they must publish regularly in some combination of top journals and university presses. We are a research institution, and it is a cut-throat world. There are limited resources to go around, and we need the strongest people on board to give us a fighting chance at success.
These people are not hard to find. Their strengths are self-evident, and the research they generate influences how we handle important societal, economic and other policy issues.
But–they are hard to attract and they are hard to hold. They must be offered good compensation (which is the least of our difficulties), they must be offered employment within a reasonable time span (at a time when other universities, some of them foreign, are also doing so), and they must be assured that colleagues like softshellcrab will not attack or discriminate against them for being foreign. Or they will take their minds elsewhere–with the business it generates.
If a university chooses to shut itself out of the market for the best minds the world has to offer, that is it’s choice. It can choose blind protectionism. However, for those of us who need to be the best and attract the best, its important we’re not forced to. We deserve better. Our students deserve better. And America will benefit.
beauregard - January 11, 2011 at 2:43 am
I am Canadian waiting for the obligatory American search before I will likely be offered the job. The institution wants me. But, it is obliged to waste time and money looking for a local, who more than likely isn’t as qualified. I have 30 years international teaching experience in 6 countries, including previously in the US. Given that education increasingly has a global mandate, and conversely that most American academics have comparatively little international experience, someone like me is a more suitable candidate, not least because I have a global perspective and can teach from that experience; not just from an American one. Also, under NAFTA, I can get a visa at any port of entry to the US, enter and work immediately. Still, I’m made to feel like a foreign interloper, despite being on the same continent. American academics are routinely hired in Canada, with little effort. If an American academic happens to venture out into the big bad world, they are usually hired without question. But, the US still maintains a reactionary protectionist attitude, which isn’t conducive with the spirit of international academic cooperation.
blazjaso - February 4, 2011 at 2:40 am
I could call this ‘reality check time.’ It is true that foreign professors are hired increasingly by US schools. I am sure they are from fine schools as well. However, between hiring foreign and first teir PhD graduates – combined with the recession – their is simply no room for graduates like me. I will have a doctorate soon from. . . let us say ‘less than a first tier institution’ in political science. I have published many articles in reputable journals and even a book chapter. I have presented research at over a dozen conferences in the last 4 years ranging from political science to Asian studies to social science. However, (here comes the reality check) none of this matters. PhD graduates from ‘greater’ institutions in the US and other nations will always be hired before me. Whether they have any publications or many conferences matters not. Perhaps I am generalizing, but this has been my experience… so far. Perhaps it is an unfair system, but it is the system and it is reality.