No One Is Coming to Save Us

There will be no mass emigration of scholars from the U.S. during the second Trump administration like there was from Europe during World War II. We need to work together to rescue ourselves.

Every couple of months, I see an argument about why the second Trump administration will be a boon for other countries. The argument is usually supported by the history of talented scholars who emigrated from Nazi Germany and the impact it had on the United States. People will mention the litany of names of Nobel laureate so-and-so and academic star what’s-his-face and the brilliant decision the United States or the United Kingdom made in granting them sanctuary (they were almost always men). This is such a dominant narrative that one of the most popular books on the topic of European scientists that fled Nazi rule is named Hitler’s Gift.

It makes sense that people would compare 2026 U.S. higher education to 1930s Germany. The 1933 German Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service created the pretext for universities to fire the vast majority of Jewish and politically undesirable scholars (“ousted … because of their political opinions or race”). These people could try to find other work within Germany but, over time, the persecution escalated to the point that those targeted by the government had good reason to fear for their lives.

This deepening oppression led several academics to seek work outside Germany and occupied territories. Trump’s executive orders are eerily similar to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party policies. Even some actions from campus administrators share commonalities with 1930s Germany. If I said to you that, after the purges, “political loyalty was valued over academic ability in the assessment of students and in the selection and promotion of professors,” a reasonable person might assume that I was talking about the University of Florida’s search for a new president instead of the Third Reich.

But the reality is that no other countries are coming to save U.S. academics. After all, it took a massive, coordinated effort and substantial resources to help scientists escape Europe.

Countries sprang into action in response to the German civil service law, finding ways to aid “refugee” scientists through organizations like the U.S.’s Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. Originally housed at the Institute of International Education and focused on scholars working in Germany, the Emergency Committee would provide stipends to universities for funding the salary of a specific scholar working in occupied or fascist territory. Funded scholars hailed from a variety of countries, including, in order of the number of scholars funded, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, France, Poland and Spain (as well as some other countries that had only one scholar funded). The émigrés went on to work across the United States, though the majority made New York State their home.

The funding came through private donations, was matched by large private foundations and was meant to be for short-term use only. The Great Depression drastically affected the domestic academic labor market, which meant that early-career scholars did not have robust job opportunities. The Emergency Committee had to “avoid any resentment arising in educational circles in our own country from the belief that the foreign professor might remain permanently and occupy a chair in the university which an excellent American scholar might reasonably have looked forward to filling.” Thus, the committee chose to focus on private funds instead of public monies and prioritized funding older academics (between the ages of 30 and 60) so that they would not be bringing in direct competition with earlier-career scholars. The Emergency Committee thought this preferencing made sense, as it aligned with their “intent to preserve and foster high-quality scholarship rather than to dispense charity.”

But no such rescue network exists to help scholars emigrating from the U.S. And the support that foreign countries have offered is often restricted to a scholar’s field of study. For example, Ireland’s plan prioritizes scholars who study renewable energy, medical technology and life sciences, cyberthreats and flooding, and food insecurity. Yet, scholars of the humanities are typically under the most severe attacks and actually had the highest number of rescued scholars through the Emergency Committee (with other fields fairly evenly represented).

In total, the Emergency Committee’s coordinated efforts—securing funders, finding institutions willing to take the academics, selecting the academics—helped around 330 scholars. That is a fraction of the roughly 1.5 million faculty that currently work at U.S. colleges and universities.

And yet, the Emergency Committee was able to accept fewer than a tenth of a percent of applicants. With finite funding and no coordinated multinational effort to help U.S. scholars, it’s unlikely that the number of scholars who might emigrate today would approach the scale of those who left Europe during World War II.

European scholars were fleeing persecution and entering a robust, and growing, higher education system. For U.S. scholars who leave now, they have few options of systems that could offer the same opportunities as home. The U.S. higher education system may have trouble (of the authoritarian and nonauthoritarian variety), but many of our peers are also facing challenges. Governments in the U.K., the Netherlands, Italy and France are making deep cuts to higher education funding. U.K. institutions are so underfunded that every quarter presents a new tranche of layoffs. Lawmakers in Australia, Canada and the U.K. severely limited international students in response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment and housing crises. The vibrancy of the learning spaces diminished and institutions have less tuition revenue as a result. Faculty in these countries are both excited and perplexed by their governments’ plans to attract U.S. scientists while at the same time cutting research funding and prohibiting faculty from teaching in English.

No other country will come and save U.S. higher education. A minority of faculty, of those willing to leave, will be able to secure employment. As I’ve learned from the activist and organizer Mariame Kaba, that realization can either break you or liberate you. If most of us are going to stay, then it’s up to us to find allies and work together to save ourselves.