There’s been some discussion online about how European countries should recruit frustrated and/or fired American scientists who were federal employees or who worked in American universities. I have some thoughts about this at a systems level. Tl;dr: An organized program would work best to maintain the talent development pipeline and bring European scientists home, but unfortunately I struggle to see how it would work to salvage careers already underway. To make this a viable response in the long term, much more needs to be discussed and planned—things aren’t as easy as they look. You can’t do science on a combination of good will and desperation.
Background: I’m a white male American who has worked in European academic settings on the administrative side for the last 6.5 years. My analysis is based on my experiences in the Netherlands at two institutions and informed by participation in discussions across many countries. But there’s probably even more to say about the challenges this would face from the policy side.
I should also add that I haven’t read any of the history or sociology of science about scientist/academic migration, which I’m sure has informed a lot of policy in the past and might, contrary to what I indicate here, demonstrate the feasibility of such a project.
1. I would argue that the most successful integrations would happen with European-born scientists who have migrated to the US for whatever reason and will be returning to their home countries. Culturally and linguistically they’re the best-suited to do this.
The second most successful integrations would happen with those who are second or third generation immigrants themselves. They’ll understand what it means to leave a place and plant roots long-term somewhere else.
You’ll also have good outcomes with people who get trained here for their PhDs or come for postdocs and then stay. Bring people over who have had their trainings interrupted—they’ll feel like transplants but can more easily grow roots.
People with established science careers will have a harder time, as will those who have never lived outside the US, those who have never learned a language besides English, and those without recent family histories of migrations. Some of the points I detail below will touch on some reasons. But also recognise these people would be coming under duress. They probably wouldn’t have chosen to leave their institutions otherwise. They’re stressed, resentful, depressed. Yes, they’ll be professional about it all. They will try their best, because for many of them it will be the only opportunity they have to continue working in science. They'll want to make it work.
It might work for some individuals more than others, but that’s beside the point: an organized program of bringing Americans here must also return system-level advantages, so my comments here are aimed at some barriers to those.
2. For one thing, linguistic integration will not be smooth. Yes, academic life in Europe and science in general happen to a great degree in English, but English proficiency varies between countries, so the integration in that regard will not necessarily be smooth. This seems like the smallest of points. Yet even when professional life occurs mostly in English, political pressures in some countries are forcing the de-internationalising of universities, which means stricter requirements for employees about speaking the national language. The last thing that a middle-aged American scientist will have time to do is become proficient in a new language, and yet that’s what may be required of them for long-term success.
3. The limitations of American culture also need to be considered. I believe that, apart from some exceptions, Americans (no matter their race or ethnicity) don’t make very good immigrants because the national story, up until now, is about people coming to America, not people leaving it. Those who leave the US do so temporarily (think missionaries, corporate expats, college students, soldiers), a model that is engrained in thinking about leaving the US. Inevitably, because they are Americans, the scientists who get recruited will think this way too, expecting that Trump 2.0 will blow over and that being in Europe will allow them to “ride things out.” This short-termism will get in the way of integrating American scientists structurally over the long-term, which is the time span over which they will need to become effective. (There is a longer discussion to have about how much time it takes to get settled, build networks, learn the ropes, and get funding—since this recruitment project is an investment, it would take a substantial amount of time.)
Basically, people have to wrap their heads around the fact that they will have to have their whole careers here. Otherwise it’s not worth the investment, for the receiving country or for them. That will be easier to do with junior researchers, not more established folks.
Also, for the more established people who have moved, there’s always been an intervening, bridging period where they’re relying on former institutions and funding agencies in their home countries. It takes a while to cut ties entirely. I’ve seen this in action.
Moreover, American experiences abroad are implicitly — and often not so implicitly — colonialist. They’re either evangelical (we bring you something we think you need) or extractive (we take something we value) or both. I’m not saying that all of the scientists would come with a colonial mindset; I’m saying this underlies the American cultural worldview, which would be a barrier to the egalitarian basis of a workable integration.
I’m also not saying that individual scientists couldn’t come to Europe and integrate successfully. A lot of them already have. But those are a self-selected bunch, and many more moved back or moved on, even those who might have believed they were in it for the long haul.
Additionally: I know about the short-termism and the colonialism because I’ve battled those in my own reactions to living abroad. I’ve discussed it with other Americans, and I’ve seen other Americans behave that way.
4. Consider also a few issues of race and ethnicity. If the receiving countries are expecting white people when they recruit Americans, they might be in for a surprise. Though some ethnic and racial groups are still underrepresented in US science, there will likely be a good number of south Asians and east Asians, especially in STEM fields. (This is something to flesh out later with some statistics). My point is: there will probably be a surprising amount of resistance to scientists of color, maybe not immediately, but eventually. For context, a Dutch person who criticized immigrants to the Netherlands said my (white) family are “good” immigrants. If recruited American scientists resemble asylum seekers, they might become mistaken for other group and thus politically problematic. It may not happen within departments or universities, but taken at the societal level, it could present a challenge. The politics might get dicey.
Similarly, if scientists of color are expecting to find in Europe the same DEI-forward institutional discourse that existed until recently in the US, they will be very disappointed. They might be uncomfortable without the public-facing support. In the Netherlands, the only overtly discussed and defended dimension of diversity is gender, and I’m talking hiring, promotion and recruitment mechanisms as well as funding and publishing processes. Things may be different in other countries, but in the Netherlands there are no concerted efforts to make academic staff more racially, ethnically, or nationally diverse. There are a few funding mechanisms for short-term stays for scholars from difficult situations (e.g. Ukraine). This is a topic that deserves a more thorough discussion, and academia in Europe definitely needs to become more diverse along a range of dimensions. But that won’t be this year or even this decade.
5. There’s the question of fairness and how the recruited American scientists would be perceived in the European sphere by the “native” scientists who have been underfunded and precarious up until now. How are they going to react when new arrivals from elsewhere get juicy start-up packages and permanent contracts? Not well, I can tell you. The bigger the group, the bigger the resentments.
In the Netherlands, there’s a deeply engrained culture of egalitarianism. For better or worse, anything that smacks of elitism is held at arm’s length. Of course, this is also deployed selectively—to enjoy the egalitarian vibes you have to be deemed “enough.” Either way, bringing people in creates a separate class of scholars who would be resented from the outset.
I assume that we’re not talking about recruiting moral philosophers or literature scholars, people who require virtually no overhead, but soil geologists and climate modelers and biochemists and virus experts, all of whom 1) work in teams and 2) require substantial infrastructure investments. Are we talking about importing a whole team to Europe? Or bringing over a senior PI who would then rebuilt their lab personnel from scratch? The first case would be prohibitively expensive. Realistically speaking, the second would set someone’s career back half a decade.
And then in either case, who funds their research once they get here? They couldn’t rely on US funding, so they’d have to explore European funds. But learning that system would take time, as would building local consortia. So yes, you might be able to bring people here. But would their work be sustainable in the European funding environment? That is my day job, so I would be happy to be involved with that somehow. But it’s not going to be easy.
6. One way to mitigate the envy of locals is some sort of systematic search for quality scientists/teams. That would have to be set up and run carefully, because it needs to show ROI on the science side and be politically defensible, which is challenging even in the best of times, when the general populace has difficulty understanding scientific research and more generally mistrusts elites, especially during these populist times.
Building a robust defensible process wouldn't be quick either, so you are either 1) jumping to scoop up as much talent as you can now and sorting it out later or 2) waiting to build and then run a process, by which time many candidates will have moved on from academic science. Neither are appetizing. The problem is that European universities do not move quickly. If the US public sector hasn't adopted the "fail fast and often" model of the private sector, then the European public sector definitely would have a harder time. Moving fast isn't in the DNA.
7. Then there’s the way the administrative apparatus in universities and research institutes would react. (This is where I have my day job, by a fluke of circumstance, so I feel I can speak to this substantially.) Let's be realistic: These are by and large local nationals. They often already struggle to grasp academic culture and researcher priorities, and when everyone is speaking to each other in their second languge, things are less easy. These university systems will be able to absorb individuals more easily than large groups, for which there should be someone in a steward or ambassador or translator role. Otherwise, administrators and staffers in those systems will feel overwhelmed by foreign modes. And they’re not necessarily going to be sensitive to the duress that their American hires will have been under for months, maybe years. There will need to be a trauma-informed administrative sensibility, and if I’m honest I don’t see a lot of capacity for that, not where it would matter.
This isn't as much of an implicit criticism as it seems, because any institutional system and the actors in it would struggle with these matters too.
ADDED LATER: 8. I meant to write this before but forgot: I don't know the figures exactly off the top of my head, but the social model in many European countries makes hiring PhDs (who are staff, not students), postdocs, and professors more expensive than just salary costs. So anyone who thinks that this can be done affordably, based on salary costs in the US, could stand to learn more about budget making. Maybe this is also the case for hires in US universities, and the total costs are equivalent between the US and Europe, in which case it's me who can stand to learn more.
The other budgetary fact that has to impact any scenario is labor law. In the Netherlands, employees can work up to three years, then they must be offered a permanent contract. This holds for everyone except PhD candidates. Basically, any program to bring large groups of people to Europe would be killing their budgets in the long run because they would have committed to providing permanent contracts in the long run. Sure, you can think of the previous three years as probationary. But see 6 above: if you have in fact searched for the best candidates and vetted them, it's unlikely they will have done things to rule themselves out.
