In a sprawling lab in Evanston, Illinois, Michaël Elbaz watched a tiny mouse scamper across its cage. The Northwestern University postdoctoral researcher has spent hundreds of hours monitoring the animals — tracing the intricate interplay of neuronal activity and decision-making processes.

“You could spend your whole life trying to understand just one part of this,” he said, gesturing to a diagram of a rodent brain.

The research has consumed nearly five years of Elbaz’s life. But a new federal policy may cut his study short.

The French national came to the U.S. with an exchange visitor visa, which is soon set to expire. To remain in the country, he planned to petition for an H-1B visa, the primary employment pathway for foreign professionals. Then, earlier this month, the Trump administration announced each new application would cost the sponsoring organization $100,000, rather than the previous fees of roughly $1,000.

The move has unleashed panic across local business and universities, which rely on the H-1B program to fill thousands of positions. It’s an abrupt overhaul to a 30-year program that has steadily built up the country’s research and technology infrastructure.

“It’s quite stressful, because I don’t know whether, in three months, I will have to pack my things and go back to Europe,” Elbaz said.

Experts say the fee is too high for most businesses and universities to pay commonly, effectively ending the visa for entry-level positions.

“It could have really catastrophic consequences for potential H-1B visa holders, but also for companies and the U.S. economy as a whole,” said Nicole Hallett, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago.

In its order, the White House cited cases of American tech companies laying off thousands of American workers, while hiring lower-paid H-1B visa holders. Nationwide, the number of foreign workers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields doubled from 2000 to 2019 — representing more than a quarter of that workforce. Meanwhile, unemployment rates for American college graduates in some of those fields have climbed.

Still, experts and businesses across various sectors warned the abrupt reversal could disrupt the U.S. economy and result in a surge of unfilled positions.

“At a time when employers are finding it hard to attract and retain workers, risking eliminating a tool used by many Illinois employers across key industries may risk increasing economic uncertainty … (and) may create a challenging workforce environment,” Lou Sandoval, president and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, told the Tribune in a statement.

Big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, banking giant JPMorgan Chase, and consultants like the Indian multinational company Tata Consultancy Services are among the top employers of H-1B visa holders.

In response to the fee change, leaders of Nvidia and OpenAI emphasized the importance of attracting the best minds to the United States. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told NBC, “I believe in merit-based immigration … I would beg the president. He has accomplished border control, which is great … but after that we should have good immigration.”

American universities also depend on revenue and research from foreign students, who typically pay higher tuition than domestic students. Foreign visa holders account for about one-third of new STEM doctorates, and more than half in some fields, such as computer science and mathematics.

“The pool of qualified applicants is heavily internationalized,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University. “There simply are not enough U.S. citizens and permanent residents to staff engineering programs, computer science programs and research laboratories.”

At Northwestern, nearly 70% of postdoctoral researchers are international, according to their union. Though the H-1B visas are awarded through a lottery system, colleges and universities are exempt from the cap — allowing institutions to recruit internationally with few restrictions.

In the current federal fiscal year, the University of Illinois Chicago petitioned to employ 208 H1-B visas, the fifth highest in the state. The University of Chicago petitioned for 166, while Northwestern petitioned for 163, according to data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Elbaz, 35, currently holds a J-1 visa with a maximum stay of five years. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience in Canada, but was drawn to the U.S. for its globalized research infrastructure.

In the years since, he’s built a life in Evanston. He married a fellow foreigner and has a 2-year-old daughter, who holds U.S. citizenship. But if Northwestern is unable to petition for his H1-B visa within three months, the family will be forced to leave the country.

“Uncertainties prevail to a degree I have never really experienced before,” Elbaz said.

Ekta Bhattacharya, another Northwestern postdoc, hoped to secure an H-1B visa to work in the agricultural industry. A year ago, the 35-year-old left her life in India to research synthetic plant biology. Now, her long-term employment prospects are uncertain.

“The move, career-wise, was a huge risk I have taken,” Bhattacharya said. “That is something very frustrating and disappointing.”

Many of her peers, also from India, have already planned to return to their home country. “We don’t see many other options here,” she said.

The program certainly could be reformed, Hallett said, such as by setting higher minimum salary requirements for new hires. But as with other presidential executive orders attempting to curtail programs that Congress set by law, Hallett said, “It seems like a transparent attempt to destroy the program without having to go to Congress.”

The H-1B is meant to fill temporary positions for specialized skills such as computer-related jobs, researchers, engineers and doctors for which there are not enough American workers. The program allows for-profit businesses to hire 85,000 foreign workers a year, plus an unlimited number at universities and nonprofits, out of hundreds of thousands of applications. More than 70% of those hired come from India, and another 12% from China.

By comparison, the United States has some 700,000 domestic postsecondary STEM graduates each year.

H-1B workers generally make on average in Chicago $172,720, according to ZipRecruiter. But the pro-labor union Economic Policy Institute found that outsourced employees in particular are underpaid, undercutting the labor market for American workers.

“Thanks to (the Department of Labor’s) failure to enforce the wage laws or close the outsourcing loophole,” the institute reported, “DOL is in effect subsidizing the offshoring of high-paying U.S. jobs in information technology that once served as a pathway to the middle class, including for workers of color.”

Other studies have found that the H-1B program promotes economic development by attracting people to work, spend money and start businesses here. When H-1B is restricted, the pro-immigrant American Immigration Council warns, employers can go to foreign countries to hire people to work there.

Don Garner, an immigration attorney in Chicago who helps companies find workers through H1-B visas, told the Tribune the new fee is “outlandish,” and will suppress the United States’ great advantage in attracting the best minds from abroad.

“The H-1B visa is one of the best ways for international students to be hired in the United States,” Garner said. “It contributes not only to the economy, but to the overall intelligence of the U.S. We get the best and brightest to come here. The U.S. is shooting itself in the foot.”

As with recent changes in tariffs, uncertainty over the rules is leaving business leaders in the dark over what to do, Garner added, “This is the worst way to run a business,” he said. “Uncertainty is the worst.”

In the Evanston lab, visa hopeful Elbaz sat by his monitor, scrolling through pages of his research. The work still faces months of peer review, and is expected to conclude next summer. Northwestern typically bars postdocs from working remotely — but he hopes school officials might make an exception if he leaves for France.

Pacing past rows of microscopes, he imagined his research career abroad: “Honestly, I would be better treated in many, many countries.”

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