Researchers, academic officials and science policy makers are expressing alarm at President Trump’s order barring entry to the United States to people from certain predominantly Muslim countries, saying it could hinder research, affect recruitment of top scientists and dampen the free exchange of scientific ideas.
The executive order, issued on Friday and clarified somewhat over the weekend by administration officials, potentially affects thousands of students and researchers from Iran, Iraq and five other countries. Foreigners fill the undergraduate and especially graduate ranks at many American universities, and newly minted Ph.D.s from overseas flock to the United States for research and teaching positions in academic laboratories.
Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the Association of American Universities, said that by one estimate, there were about 17,000 students from the seven countries at American universities.
“I’m concerned about it hampering our ability to recruit outstanding graduate students,” said Samuel L. Stanley Jr., the president of Stony Brook University on Long Island. Dr. Stanley spent the weekend monitoring the work of immigration lawyers in a successful effort to release a Stony Brook graduate student from Iran, Vahideh Rasekhi, who was en route to Kennedy Airport when the order was issued and was detained after she landed.
“Immigration into the United States is tremendously important to science,” said Soumya Raychaudhuri, a Harvard Medical School professor whose Iranian postdoctoral researcher, Samira Asgari, was barred on Saturday from boarding a flight to begin her job in his laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There are other countries competing for this talent pool, and walking away from that jeopardizes our standing.”
Researchers, academic officials and science policy makers are expressing alarm at President Trump’s order barring entry to the United States to people from certain predominantly Muslim countries, saying it could hinder research, affect recruitment of top scientists and dampen the free exchange of scientific ideas.
The executive order, issued on Friday and clarified somewhat over the weekend by administration officials, potentially affects thousands of students and researchers from Iran, Iraq and five other countries. Foreigners fill the undergraduate and especially graduate ranks at many American universities, and newly minted Ph.D.s from overseas flock to the United States for research and teaching positions in academic laboratories.
Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the Association of American Universities, said that by one estimate, there were about 17,000 students from the seven countries at American universities.
“I’m concerned about it hampering our ability to recruit outstanding graduate students,” said Samuel L. Stanley Jr., the president of Stony Brook University on Long Island. Dr. Stanley spent the weekend monitoring the work of immigration lawyers in a successful effort to release a Stony Brook graduate student from Iran, Vahideh Rasekhi, who was en route to Kennedy Airport when the order was issued and was detained after she landed.
“Immigration into the United States is tremendously important to science,” said Soumya Raychaudhuri, a Harvard Medical School professor whose Iranian postdoctoral researcher, Samira Asgari, was barred on Saturday from boarding a flight to begin her job in his laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There are other countries competing for this talent pool, and walking away from that jeopardizes our standing.”
Some foreign universities, while condemning the ban, also pointed out that they still welcomed students and researchers from anywhere. The University of British Columbia announced the establishment of a task force, with an initial budget of 250,000 Canadian dollars (about $190,000), “to determine what assistance the university can offer those affected.”
Since the restrictions, some institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California system, have advised students or faculty members from Iran, Iraq and the other affected countries not to travel overseas until further notice.
The order could prevent many foreign researchers from making short-term trips to attend conferences and other scientific meetings overseas for fear of not being able to return. The restrictions could also affect meetings in the United States, as some foreign scientists would not be allowed to travel here.
The country’s largest general scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said it was worried that the restrictions might reduce attendance at its annual meeting in two weeks in Boston. Hundreds of foreigners normally attend the conference. “We are of course concerned that this issue may affect scientists and students traveling to Boston,” said Tiffany Lohwater, an official with the association. She said the organization was considering alternative measures, including free live-streaming of sessions, for those who could not attend.
Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, said her department had a number of Iranian students and researchers. Using social media, Dr. Golbeck in recent days has organized a database of people willing to shelter scientists and others who were in transit to the United States and were halted by the order.
“There’s a lot of people from these seven countries,” Dr. Golbeck said. “And suddenly there’s this possibility that faculty members, students, postdocs and others who are outside the country for one reason or another suddenly can’t come back.”
Solmaz Shariat Torbaghan, an Iranian neuroscience researcher at New York University who was awaiting a green card, said the order would force her to soon make a decision: stay and take her chances, or move to Canada. “My partner and I just moved into a new place here, we are waiting for our furniture, and were hoping to have our parents visit us in a couple of months, which is not a possibility anymore,” she said. “Now, I don’t know what’s coming next.”
The uncertainty, she added, is not good for her research colleagues, either. “People in my lab are very supportive,” she said, “but in an experimental lab, people need to know they can count on you, that you’re not going to be suddenly gone and leave the project.”
The order may also affect work at some of the country’s most prestigious medical institutions.
Eleven patients from the seven affected countries, which also include Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, were planning to travel to Johns Hopkins University for medical treatment within the next 90 days, said Pamela Paulk, the president of Johns Hopkins Medicine International. All have visas, she said, but now it is not clear whether or when they may come.
“We are taking steps to see what the ban means for them,” she said. “Right now the ban is vague, and we don’t know if there will be health exceptions.”
She said that patients who travel from the Middle East to the United States for treatment generally have severe illnesses that cannot be treated in their home countries, and need complex treatments like neurosurgery, heart operations or bone marrow transplants for cancer or blood diseases. Some cannot afford, medically, to wait.
Johns Hopkins may also lose at least one graduate student. Omid Zobeiri, 28, is an Iranian citizen who began working on his doctorate in biomedical engineering in September 2015 at McGill University in Montreal. His mentor and supervisor at McGill moved to Johns Hopkins last summer and hoped to take Mr. Zobeiri with her so he could continue the research he had begun in her laboratory.
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Mr. Zobeiri applied for a visa during the summer, but had not received one yet when the ban was announced on Friday. “After this ban, I basically give up right now, or wait some months,” Mr. Zobeiri said. “I don’t know my future.”
Kathleen Cullen, Mr. Zobeiri’s supervisor and a professor of biomedical engineering, described him as “phenomenally talented and a wonderful scientist,” and said he had been selected from among many applicants.
She said his being kept out of the United States was “a major impediment and is slowing the pace of research in my group.”
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