I do academic research that produces Ph.D. students who are ideal candidates for semiconductor companies once they graduate. I just had two graduate, with one from Nepal going to Intel and a US student going to Global Foundries. I'll have another one this summer from Nepal who looks like he'll wind up with Micron. These companies are hiring like crazy and need talent to fill up the fabrication plants that are being developed in the US. It's partially a response to the push to bring chip manufacturing back to the US. More Ph.D. graduates, foreign or domestic, with skills to meet their needs is a positive for the semiconductor companies.

For the students, every single one that I've met has had a goal of staying in the US with their families once they're done. Both of my students from Nepal are in their 30s, married, and had kids during grad school. To me, that's the American dream in action. I also have faculty colleagues from China and India who have family back home. They're very happy to live in the US in most cases. To assume they're a security threat is crazy to me. The vast majority of work that we do at universities gets published in open literature, so there really aren't any secrets to steal. Some students wind up back in their home countries as faculty or R&D engineers, but they are taking the US education back, not our trade secrets or classified info. Most of the cases that have made the news about "spies" have turned out to be big nothing-burgers when you examine the facts.

The immigration barriers are a real hurdle to bringing in new graduate students and postdoctoral researchers though. I tried to hire a postdoc from India last year and it was going to take a year for his visa issues to get worked out. By then the funding I had would have been wasted, so I wound up having to use it in other, less efficient, ways. My students who graduate now will eventually have the chance to get a green card, but it will be 5+ years of work. Their kids are US citizens and they have no desire to go home to Nepal, so we're really just leaving them in limbo for no good reason IMO.