Negotiating the “Closet” in U.S. Academia: Foreign Scholars on the Job Market

Almost three decades ago, Acker (1990) claimed that organizations are structured around a normative ideal worker: a man “whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children” (p. 149). A number of scholars have built upon her work, suggesting that normative “professional” workers are also imagined as White (Nkomo, 1992), able-bodied (Mik-Meyer, 2016), and heterosexual (Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009). In this essay, I explore the abstract worker in relation to immigration status, a form of difference that has received little attention in organizational research (for exceptions, see Shenoy-Packer, 2015; Shenoy-Packer & Gabor, 2015). By focusing on the specific case of foreign ¹ scholars in U.S. academia, I show how the normative ideal worker is also a citizen or legal permanent resident who does not require an employer-sponsored visa. As a result, when foreign scholars in the United States navigate the academic job market, they must also negotiate the closet as it relates to their immigration status.

Immigration status is a unique form of difference because individuals who require work visas must disclose this information once they are offered a job. Prior to receiving an offer, well-grounded fears of discrimination may lead foreign scholars to closet their immigration status during the job search. These fears of discrimination can stem from the lack of any type of legal protection for this category of workers. Fears of discrimination can also arise from the requirement of employers who do sponsor visas to submit complex paperwork and spend thousands of dollars in visa processing fees. Because it is more complex and costly to hire foreign workers, they do not meet the abstract ideal worker norm, even when they are immensely qualified for the job.

Like other categories of workers who do not meet the ideal worker norm, foreign scholars may engage in “passing” to attempt to achieve it. Passing is a communicative practice through which individuals seek to conceal a non-normative identity to be seen in a more normative and desirable way (Clair, Beatty, & Maclean, 2005; Mitra & Doctor, 2016). Many passing strategies have been identified in organizational research, particularly for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ)-identified workers who seek to avoid discrimination by passing as heterosexual. These strategies include keeping conversations focused on others, giving false or misleading information about oneself, avoiding conversations with certain people, and using ambiguous language (Spradlin, 1998; Ward & Winstanley, 2005). In this essay, I draw from interviews with 25 foreign scholars currently working at different institutions across the United States to explore how foreign scholars who require employer-sponsored visas negotiate the closet and engage in passing while on the academic job market.

The vast majority of the scholars whom I interviewed stated that they did attempt to closet their immigration status throughout the job application process. Some of their mentors explicitly advised them to do so. The language of the closet is particularly apparent in one Japanese scholar’s account of her experiences, as she states, “I tended to hide my immigration situation whenever I contacted a search committee chair.” She went on to say that she believes that disclosing that information would make her a less desirable candidate. As such, she openly recognizes that because of her immigration status and need for a visa, she does not embody the normative ideal worker.

My data show that Eisenberg’s (1984) concept of strategic ambiguity is a prominent passing strategy used by foreign scholars, particularly when completing standardized application forms. A question similar to “Are you legally eligible for employment in the United States?” is common on these forms. Whereas “yes” and “no” are almost always the only two options, the situation of foreign scholars is more nuanced: They are legally eligible to work with an employer-sponsored visa, but not without one. The scholars I interviewed overwhelmingly interpreted these questions to be asking whether they would be eligible to work with a visa. As one Spanish scholar stated, “I thought, you know, since I’m in doubt I’ll just go for the yes, and if we need to clarify that then we will eventually.” She and many others believed that selecting “no” would automatically disqualify their application because they would be mistakenly perceived as being in the United States without documentation or as being ineligible for a visa. Thus, they made sense of the ambiguous questions in ways that enabled them to temporarily pass as normative.

In interactions during job interviews, the ability to pass as a U.S. citizen or permanent resident is not equally available to all foreign scholars. Indeed, the ability to successfully pass is contingent upon the invisibility of the identity that individuals are seeking to closet (Clair et al., 2005). Because the normative regime of Whiteness equates “Americanness” with White individuals and native English speakers (Morrissey, 2015), foreign scholars who are White, Anglo-Saxon, and who speak with an accent interpreted as “American” can be expected to be more successful at closeting their immigration status than people of color who speak in a way that is not commonly understood as “American.” Indeed, many scholars explicitly recognized how the intersections of their different identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, native language, and national origin) shaped the extent to which they are—or are not—perceived as foreign. As one White Canadian scholar whose native language is English stated, “I was very cognizant of the fact that nobody that I was talking to was wondering: is this person legal? Are we going to have to pay for her paperwork?” She recognized that because she was commonly assumed by others to be American, she was immensely privileged in relation to other foreign scholars whose foreignness is marked in clearer ways (e.g., names and accents commonly associated with “foreignness”). This example shows the importance of adopting an intersectional framework when examining both the closet and immigration status (e.g., Holvino, 2010; McCall, 2005), as foreign scholars experience privilege and disadvantage in vastly different ways based upon the extent to which they automatically pass as “American” and appear as normative ideal workers.

As mentioned above, foreign scholars must eventually disclose their need for a visa once they are offered a job, making coming out required. Many participants came out only when they were offered a position because they considered this to be the least risky time to disclose that information. One Taiwanese scholar described his coming out experience in the following way: “The department chair called me saying ‘we offer you this job.’ The first thing out of my mouth is, ‘I need to know if the university is going to sponsor my working visa application.’” In this case, the visa question was at the top of this scholar’s mind, but he did not feel comfortable bringing it up earlier during the job search process. As such, he sought to closet his non-normative immigration status and embody the normative ideal worker until he had no choice but to come out and ask about visa sponsorship.

Not all foreign scholars seek to closet their immigration status as they navigate the job market. For instance, one French scholar stated that she lists her country of citizenship on her vita, clearly indicating her need for a visa. However, even despite her transparency, she was later told by her department chair and dean that “there was nothing to indicate that you were foreign when you applied for the position” and was accused of misrepresenting her immigration status. Moreover, the fact that she, and all other foreign scholars, even have to think about when or how to disclose their immigration status demonstrates that the closet is an inescapable feature of their experiences, just as the closet is a defining feature of the lives of LGBT individuals (Adams, 2011).

Although there is limited organizational scholarship in this area, this essay shows that immigration status is a form of difference that “matters” (e.g., Allen, 2011) and that it is intertwined with the abstract ideal worker norm. Moreover, the ways foreign workers experience their immigration status are heavily intertwined with multiple intersections of difference and the extent to which they pass as normative ideal workers throughout the job search. Given the rise of anti-immigration discourse in the United States and Europe, it is now particularly timely for organizational scholars to further explore how immigration status intersects with other socially significant forms of difference to shape organizational experiences and power relations.