When, on 8 December 2023, my family and I landed in Buenos Aires to spend the holidays with relatives and friends, our native Argentina and its people seemed particularly sluggish and quiet, as though immersed in a fog of uncertainty.
Javier Milei, a highly controversial right-wing libertarian, had recently won the presidential elections and was to be sworn in two days later. Milei had risen to prominence in a country that has long struggled with the world’s highest inflation on the back of aggressively articulated promises to rid it of its “parasitic political caste” and root out “impoverishing socialism” – which, in his view, also encompasses feminism, environmentalism and social justice.
Milei’s win was as unlikely as it was decisive. Wielding a chainsaw during campaign rallies, he had proposed a suite of anarcho-capitalist remedies, including “dynamiting” the Argentine Central Bank, legalising the organ trade and getting rid of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Nor was the ministry’s closure the only policy that was rendering my personal future as a scientist very uncertain. Milei also repeatedly claimed during his campaign that scientific activities only contribute to society if they are able to attract private investors. Consequently, he had gone as far as to suggest privatising or even closing Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the leading governmental research institution in Latin America, comprising more than 20,000 researchers, technicians, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows across a network of more than 300 institutes.
During those tumultuous last days of 2023, I had one objective other than vacationing: applying to become a researcher at CONICET. This was because, after more than nine years in the US for doctoral and postdoctoral work, our US immigration status was uncertain. As the holder of a J-1 visa – a type of non-immigrant visa issued to researchers and scholars – I was subject to a standard two-year home residency requirement at its expiration. This requirement needs to be either fulfilled or waived before a new visa type, such as a work visa, can be issued.
Waivers are routinely granted to scientists – except for a small group, of which I happened to be a member: Fulbright scholars. As an exchange programme, Fulbright considers that its mission would be undermined if students and scientists did not return to their home countries, so the Fulbright Commission and the US Department of State strictly enforce the return policy. Hence, just as Argentina was becoming a leading producer of scientists in exile, I was being forced to take the opposite route.
I am an evolutionary biologist. My discipline has shaped the modern world, providing tools with which we fight pests and improve crops, understand the spread of diseases and conserve biodiversity in the face of environmental change. Nonetheless, much of our work falls within the category of “basic research”, whose economic returns are hard to quantify and predict, and which therefore depend mostly on public investment. Even Fulbright is a public entity, funded through binational governmental budgets. It remains especially paradoxical to me that my acceptance of public funds in the past is the reason I've had to return to a country where the public funding of science is in peril.
I submitted my application to CONICET before the end-of-year deadline, which meant I could expect a response this July. Back in the US, however, I watched as the situation for scientists in Argentina rapidly deteriorated. The number of PhD scholarships was slashed, even leaving some doctoral students without funding halfway through their dissertations.
Meanwhile, rejection rates at CONICET rose to historical highs, and those few who were admitted weren’t (and still aren’t) being paid. Application deadlines for research grants have been continuously postponed, while the meagre salary increases for university employees (including teaching faculty) in the face of rampant inflation has led 85 per cent of them to fall below the poverty line. To many observers, the erosion of the scientific and academic sectors in Argentina has been so deep and systematic that it must be driven by political, rather than economic, motives.
For months, I attempted to contact Argentina’s Fulbright commission. After countless unanswered emails and phone calls, I finally received an answer: they would not consider making an exception in my case, even as they acknowledged that there was no point to my return. You see, while the Fulbright commissions of some countries consider supporting waiver applications from their grantees, others have never done so. Among the latter is Argentina’s commission, which was not ready to set a precedent despite being aware of the lack of academic opportunities back home.
Hence, I write this piece from my mother-in-law’s home in Buenos Aires, unemployed. Before leaving the US, I managed to secure a university faculty position there and was lucky that my soon-to-be home institution is willing to wait two years for my arrival. In the meantime, I am supposed to focus on “sharing the knowledge I have gained”, according to Fulbright. But it escapes me how exactly I am supposed to do this in a country whose government has decided that it does not need my knowledge – or, apparently, any knowledge at all.
As for my application to CONICET, no prizes for guessing that it was never even reviewed.
Nicolas Mongiardino Koch was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego. From August 2026, he will be an assistant professor at Colorado State University.
