Proposal From Wisconsin Congressman Would Make it Harder for Universities to Hire Faculty Using a Work Visa

Wednesday, August 6th, 2025 -- 9:00 AM

(Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) A proposal from a Republican Wisconsin congressman would make it harder for universities to use a work visa program to hire faculty and staff from other countries, while limiting private businesses’ ability to recruit high-demand workers from abroad. 

According to Joe Schulz with the Wisconsin Public Radio, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, introduced the Colleges for the American People Act, or CAP Act.

It would remove an exemption to the H-1B visa program that allows colleges and universities to use the program without counting toward the cap on the number of visas issued by the federal government for international workers at private businesses.

The bill would make prospective higher education employees go through the H-1B visa application process and compete with applicants in other industries.

Tiffany’s office said the bill would not affect current visa holders, and extensions for H-1B employees already at universities wouldn’t count against the cap in the future.

The H-1B visa program is available to citizens of other countries who hold a bachelor’s or higher degree in a field related to the work they will be doing in the United States.

It is only open to people working in specialty occupations, said Grant Sovern, a Madison immigration attorney who has spent 30 years working on H-1B visa issues.

“For example, if you have a degree in English literature and you want to do a job, that’s not a specialty occupation, unless you’re going to be an English professor,” he said. “It has to be a computer science degree for a computer engineering position or a medical degree for a physician, that kind of thing.”

The H-1B visa has a cap of 65,000 visas each fiscal year for jobs in the private sector, with another 20,000 for individuals with a U.S. master’s degree or higher, for a total of 85,000 visas annually.

H-1B workers employed at colleges and universities and certain research organizations are not subject to the cap. Tiffany told WPR that the bill is aimed at encouraging universities to educate young people to fill their in-demand jobs instead of “going to people from outside the country.”

“The universities should compete, just like private employers, to be able to bring those people in,” Tiffany said. “The thing I’ve heard is that they’re saying, ‘We sometimes don’t have people that are qualified to be able to do these jobs.’ To me, that’s an indictment of the higher education system.”

The Universities of Wisconsin system employs nearly 500 H-1B visa holders, with salaries totaling almost $43 million annually, according to a spreadsheet the system provided to a conservative media outlet.

Individual salaries for those workers ranged from $40,000 to more than $100,000 per year. Some of the job titles were redacted, but many of those visas were held by professors, researchers and scientists.

In a statement, Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson Mark Pitsch said the state university system, like all employers across the country, is competing for talent.

He said only about 1 percent of the organization’s more than 43,000 employees used those temporary work visas.

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