The Latest Travel Ban Is a Threat to Our Health

Picture a scientist. I think most of us have moved past the outdated vision of the absent-minded doof with broken black glasses and a pocket protector to a man or woman in a white coat, perhaps holding a clipboard, or staring down a microscope. But did you stop to think of what the person in that white coat looked like? More often than not these days, that person comes from China, India, or Korea.

Actual data on country of origin for scientists and doctors in the US can be hard to obtain, but I can give a surrogate marker in the distribution of ethnicities of those training at the institution where I currently work, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York City. The largest group of research trainees at MSK, postdoctoral fellows, are in an apprenticeship stage after finishing their PhD or MD graduate degrees. Of the approximately 550 postdoctoral trainees at MSK at any given time, well over 50 percent are foreign born, with significant percentages of postdocs hailing from China and India, and the balance largely from other Asian and European countries. Reflecting their national origins, well over 50 percent also hold temporary visas to be able to live in the US to practice science (the remainder are citizens or permanent residents). While I don't have data from other institutions, I suspect we are not alone in the ethnic makeup of our trainee population.

With the current policies and the pace of immigration reform, we and other academic institutions that rely heavily on "immigrant labor" will be crippled. There will be few advances in Crispr/Cas9 gene editing, nor advances in immunotherapy for cancer, treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or other neurodegenerative diseases. Foreign-born scientists are embedded in every lab, doing every task across our institution; without them we risk losing our place of prominence in the global scientific world. I fear that with further drastic measures to curb immigration, MSK alone could shed a quarter to a third of the scientific workforce, not to mention the ripple effects in medical trainees and physicians. Moreover, consider the fact that approximately 30 percent of all "American" Nobel laureates are foreign born and that foreign-born scientists are often more productive. We need an immigrant work force to further scientific discovery and to take care of patients.

A number of MSK trainees come from Syria and Iran—among the six countries singled out in the newly resurrected Muslim travel ban (which was stayed by lower Federal courts and will ultimately be decided upon by the Supreme Court). An even larger number come from other countries in the Middle East and Asia. There is palpable fear among the trainees from this part of the world—will they be able to stay and finish their work? Would they ever be allowed to stay to continue working after their postdocs? Some trainees were earlier so concerned about the ban that they canceled travel: A Pakistani graduate student at MSK canceled a trip home to see his cousin married for fear that he would not be allowed back in to complete his research. Furthermore, changes to the H1B visa process (the visa that a quarter of our postdocs hold) have made it infuriatingly difficult to retain current and recruit new trainees to our labs.

Coupled with the potentially enormous and devastating funding cuts to the NIH, NSF, immigration policies designed to put "America first" do exactly the opposite.

Ushma S. Neill, PhD, is Vice President of Scientific Education & Training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.