Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee | Hacker News Reader

Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee

alaskasnewssource.com

For those not reading the linked article, it was not about tech (although valid discussions here). I had not expected this (this is about rural Alaska):

> “In some rural districts, visa teachers make up 50% to nearly 80% of the teaching staff. School districts already invest $6,000 to $12,000 per teacher to recruit and sponsor educators through the H-1B visa process. Adding a $100,000 federal visa fee has made it financially impossible for many districts to continue hiring the teachers their students depend on.

There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well.

No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.

Is there an excess of teachers in Alaska?

I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that.

Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.

My sister was a schoolteacher in Alaska. They pay a premium, but it’s still not a life that most Americans are cut out for, including me. That means the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money. Or, we can hire foreign teachers who are qualified AND are happy to teach up there.

> foreign teachers who are qualified AND are happy to teach up there

But are they? Or are they just willing and here for the money and foot in the immigration door? Sincere question, though I have negative views of the whole H1B thing in general (not a US national, though).

If you care, you certainly can find a lot of information about it nowadays. Of course, whether you want to believe it is another question.

https://youtu.be/FSmtbSYE8pg

You thought this video proved what?

At a general level, it is a simple fact that there are more qualified/happy candidates globally than there are just in the United States. For the second part, no, I assume that money/opportunity are WHY they’re happy to teach up there. If that’s the motivation that keeps qualified teachers from turning to alcoholism or suicide, that’s a good thing for the kids.

Same issue as rural doctors, to be honest. It's hard to pay an American with a medical degree enough to live and work in that environment, so if we want to keep rural hospitals (and independent practices) staffed, we need to allow immigrants to do the work.

The alternative isn't that rural communities get doctors born in the US, it's that they get no doctors.

I thought the medical board could assign doctors to locations.

(But I don't know how it really works, maybe it was residency only?)

the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money.

1) Why is that the dichotomy?

2) Do you say the same thing about well-paid oilfield workers living in RVs, away from their families and social networks?

3) Do you think the foreign workers are happy to be in Alaska for the sake of the Alaskan experience?

For some reason, people are convinced that teacher salaries have to be suppressed, lest the "wrong people" take the jobs. As if stressing about making rent is a critical signal of virtue, exclusively for teaching.

1) because there aren’t enough teachers in-state + coming out of the lower 48 to meet demand.

2) Pay alone can’t make people happy, which is why there’s a very high alcoholism/suicide rate among oil workers, despite it typically being a more temporary gig than teaching and paying considerably more. I also hold teachers to a different standard for on-the-job demeanor than oil workers.

3) Per my brother in law, they’re happy to be in Alaska for the American experience.

4) Foreign teachers in Alaska aren’t suppressing wages. That would be true for free market jobs where schools can simply decide not to teach students if it’s not profitable, but teaching isn’t like that.

1) Because of the low wages.

2) Pay attracts workers. "Happiness" is a separate and personal issue.

3) Anecdata.

4) The fact is that far higher wages would attract American teachers for short periods. It is a free market, until exploitable labor is introduced. Foreign teachers absolutely are suppressing wages, as evidenced by the fact that the wages aren't high enough to attract American teachers.

They pay a premium or the state pays tax dollars to all residents as a premium?

There's as many teachers in Alaska as they're willing to pay for.

Having lived in bumblefuck Alaska for a year, I can honestly say that they do in fact pay more, but it's also super expensive to live in rural Alaska.

Likely a bigger issue is that very few people want to live in a town of 3000 people or less that isn't connected to the interstate road system. Money can only do so much to fix that.

Some people live in a pressurized bubble for a month for saturation diving. If the price is right you can get someone to do almost anything.

That is true but I think the salient observation here is that it's only realistic to pay so much for education. So either you can't have children in such a town, or you're forced to homeschool, or (I guess what's being suggested is) you import someone willing to work an undesirable job if it gets them into the country.

I think there's an important difference between importing labor to undercut qualified americans in a populated area versus importing labor to do a job that the vast majority of qualified americans will have no interest in at any reasonable pay rate.

Do we even realize this is the very beginning of the worldwide demographic transition? American and Worldwide cities aren't replacing themselves, and they're not having children ... as a way to save. And this is getting worse. Meanwhile the whole world is going through a demographic transition.

Which, allow me to translate, means in less than 25 years there will not be any society worldwide that has the people to allow Emigration. As stupid as it sounds now, Iran, China, the Taliban (just an example) are 15 years away from outlawing emigration, and Germany less than that. China is mostly there, btw, but apparently able to keep that little extra authoritarian detail out of the news.

You're a farmer in China? There's NO way out. You can't go to the city, you can't leave the country. No way out whatsoever, except perhaps death. And the question "how is that different from slavery?" will be fought, not answered, by Chinese authorities. As I said, pay attention, because the 2 presidents down the US president, whoever it is by then, will make the same arguments (Yes, I get that there were worse slavery systems, like the African slave trade, than that. But it's still slavery)

That means in less than a generation any American town WILL be forced to dedicate their own population to everything they need done.

> the vast majority of qualified americans will have no interest in at any reasonable pay rate.

Herein lies the whole problem. It is the potential employees who determine what a reasonable pay rate is, not the employer - the cat decides what kind of milk it likes.

you could also export the children, or the whole family, to a place that can support teachers

It doesn't matter how much money you have if you can't spend it.

That applies to a ton of people in the military. People are capable of delayed gratification.

Does Amazon not deliver to Alaska?

I would be fully willing to live in a pressurized bubble for a month for saturation diving. Sounds cool and doable. Living for years in rural Alaska and being a teacher? Absolutely not.

That being said, there are not that many saturation divers, because being a month in a bubble is kind of least problem with it. The lifelong health impact is.

The biggest issue with saturation diving is not the pressure or the health impact, it's the fact that you share a tiny space with 3-6 other people for a month.

This might be the opposite of living in Alaska where you share a really huge amount of space with not a lot of other people.

Yes, there is supply and demand. However, that doesnt mean a government cant restrict supply.

It precisely and explicitly demands that the government restrict supply of foreign labor, as that increases the fair market value of American wage earners. It increases the opportunities for young Americans to trade their labor for a start in life, to support their families, and to make our nation stronger. Importing foreign labor makes it more difficult to justify hiring Americans, and undermines the nation's long term success for short term gains. It is effectively an Anti-investment.

If the clearing rate is equal to the cost of an engineer at a tech firm in SF, the education budget for a small town in Alaska wouldn't afford it.

Your formulation isn't wrong, however it covers only one scenario. What happens when the locality cannot afford the cost to attract people to their region?

This is not even theoretical, its what happened to the rest of the world, as their best and brightest immigrated to America or Europe.

You could say "them's the breaks" and I would understand. However people vote for solutions, so how would you cover the worst case scenario?

we already massively subsidize Alaskan transportation and infrastructure. Adding school teachers, or changing school teacher education requirements, are both options.

This supposes and outcome where domestic wages are increased and investment is made. It supposes that americans are willing and capable of doing the labor at a price point that americans will accept.

It is also possible we will simply not teach these children (or build infrastructure, grow labor intensive crop, ect).

You're describing a market failure. That is a possibility with life. Our economic system worked during eras of very low immigration, namely the 1930s thru 1950s, and our education system was the best in the whole world.

I hear this argument all the time. There's an excess of this, there's an excess of that. Seems it only comes from people who are not directly involved in hiring of such roles. We hired for an analyst role few months ago in the bay area and there was no qualified American applicants. My wife is in pavement consultancy and they hardly ever find qualified Americans for pavement design jobs.

People can’t seem to separate the issue of exploitation of H1B by (mostly Indian) consultancy mills to lower wages and bypass normal immigration vs the legitimate value of specialized skilled visas. You can fix one without killing the other.

It’s plausible Education might be one of the industries that gets exploited as they have no caps in the lottery like other H1 visas categories such as tech or doctors. But I don’t know enough about education visas personally.

Yep, H1B visa abuse exists and should be clamped down on, but it's also extremely vital to our sustained economic growth and frankly our biggest growth industry: tech

No, it’s clear that H1Bs have destroyed the American software industry as evidenced by the fact that the American software industry saw the largest growth in wages relative to any other field in the U.S. over the past 2 decades while also seeing a massive growth in the numbers of employees over the same period, also outpacing every other industry here as well.

Clearly the H1B has been devastating to American workers unlike all those other industries which haven’t seen an influx of a capped number of H1B workers every year.

And that’s even before we get to how the U.S. software industry remains one of a handful of industries where the U.S. is the leader in the world and has generated trillions in wealth, and is largely responsible for the US’s continuing dominance in the world today.

> there was no qualified American applicants

I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.

In order to find a qualified candidate :

(A) individual must be interested in job/benefits/comp. and decide to apply. This makes them a ‘candidate’ (B) candidate must be qualified per minimum requirements

It’s entirely possible to not have candidates if no one is interested in the position at the stated comp/benefit rate.

The original article is about a federal judge blocking H1B fee because there is a teacher shortage in Alaska. Can you believe that?

Every post I see from young people trying to get tech jobs is about applying to 500 places to get one interview. It’s a lie.

That quote isn’t about a tech job.

He posted on another comment. They were offering way under market. Shocking, really.

150k-200k base offered to a fresh grad for some python and low-level, data intensive work. Really shocking.

You ended up getting a fresh grad because you asked for 4+ years of experience both broad and deep.

150-200k is probably reasonable for a new grad in the bay (not certain what starting salaries there are now) but not for what you actually asked for.

I’m not hating on you. Your budget is what it is. But you’re well under market and that’s why you didn’t get the applicants you wanted.

> there was no qualified American applicants.

But are there qualified Americans who could easily switch to that job for one reason or another? Is the issue a lack of qualified professionals or is it a lack of interest by qualified professionals in the listed position?

It's very easy to receive no applications from qualified professionals that do in fact exist by simply not offering to pay them enough (among many other things). That shouldn't mean you get to undercut the domestic labor market; rather you should be forced to rethink the business plan.

One of the problems is that geography and demographic movement trends within that geography is a very real thing.

Let’s say a rural town has lost population in the last 20 years, and most of the population that left is educated.

Now they need a teacher, which requires a bachelors or even masters degree.

The rural town’s unemployment rate is 10% but there are no qualified teachers who are unemployed.

So now we want to move someone in from a nearby urban center that has a big market of educated people. But the unemployment rate in that big urban area is 3%, and the area is wealthier with a higher salary rate for jobs across the income spectrum.

Let’s say my local teacher salary is $50,000, the big city teacher salary is $90,000, and the big city high school diploma career salary is $50,000.

I have to find someone who is a qualified teacher who isn’t already a teacher and isn’t already working someone where else that’s still paying better than my local area. Plus, that person has family, friends, and prefers the big city with all its amenities and infrastructure. I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move because I’m already employed and happy.

In contrast, someone in a foreign country is potentially getting a huge upgrade to move to the US or another developed wealthy country and is way more motivated to make that leap.

I imagine these programs exist because the cost benefit just makes sense. Not only do you solve the imbalance faster, easier, cheaper, but now the wider country has gained educated population which is generally an economic benefit.

Certainly there are flaws in the system that need to be fixed. I don’t mean to advocate for it necessarily, just explain why I think it exists.

I would also point out that it’s not necessarily the case that the local labor market is being undercut (see the geographic example I gave above), it’s being expanded, and that includes adding someone who is paying taxes, buying stuff from local businesses, etc, which they do even before they become citizens.

> I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move

If everyone feels that way, then it's not an above-market rate, it's by definition the market rate. The market rate for a job might be different at different locations.

(Note that I'm not taking a position on whether or not using the H1B program to reduce the market rate here is a good idea)

Yeah I agree with all that but notice that the comment I responded to was either about an analyst in the bay area or a stream of pavement design jobs in unspecified locations. I wouldn't necessarily object to the metric of "do qualified americans exist" being limited to a certain geographic area as long as the resulting criteria was sufficiently difficult to abuse.

The bay area's existing talent pool is hugely immigrant in nature. It's totally within expectations to put a job post for an analyst of some kind there and only get immigrant visa holders applying. They also make a lot more than many Americans who wouldn't be qualified but still live in the area.

What salary range were you offering ?

Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty.

What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?

From what little I gather from online job listings, most foreign labor dependent positions are trying to pay 90K for a masters degree, maybe 120-140K Bay Area. Additionally, many of these job listings want extremely specific degrees or certifications that frankly are of little interest to US citizens - but F1 students will take any masters program despite the program having little salary benefit - the degree is a requirement for the visa.

I have a hard time believing you can’t find a US civil engineer who could learn the subject matter right out of college. Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

> What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?

4+ years in product development. Python/R + a low-level language. Terabyte-scale data stream and batch processing. HPC knowledge (vectorization, memory access, distributed computing) to build efficient algorithms. Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Stats, Physics, CS, or Engineering).

Upper limit on compensation was 200k.

> Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

You answered your own question. The American engineering pool consists mostly of high school diplomas who can't pass PE exam at multiple trials.

Edit: coincidentally, my wife was offered a state civil engineering job in Bay area. Didn't take up because the salary offered was below 100k, even with 5 years of experience.

There are a ton of jobs that pay as well or better with lower requirements, even outside the bay area. Anyone with that level of experience, Python and a low level language isn't going to take you up.

I'm not normally in agreement with the "you're not paying enough, there's plenty of people" crowd, because I've been on the hiring side too and know what a crapshoot it can be... But you're definitely offering too little for those requirements.

I responded to the point someone made- there's an excess of workers in America. Firstly, when there's an excess, wages are supposed to lower, even for Americans. Secondly, even if there is an excess, there was no evidence of that in my experience. In addition to the full time role we also interviewed interns in fall, and in my experience they were all either immigrant or children of immigrants.

I'm sorry you think $200k/yr to sling Python for a 26 year old is too low?

Come on man be real right now

I mean I don’t have a horse in this race, but I don’t think this is a good example.

If this is a senior enough position to justify expecting this level of specialization, that compensation is not nearly high enough, so issuing this H-1B would add downwards pressure on the compensation of American worker.

If this is not a very senior role, the American worker’s interest is that you find someone with a less specific background, compatible enough so that they can be trained.

Yes we hired a fresh graduate with relevant research experience who is being trained.

> Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries

It does not generally. H1B employees are more expensive usually. In most companies - like any notable tech company - they are paid exactly the same due to fixed compensation plans, but cost more to the company once you include legal fees, processing fees, and especially the time delays and risks. It’s not even close in terms of a cost comparison. This isn’t a controversy among people who are actually involved in hiring and compensation - it’s well known. But this perception persists.

They don't have to undercut their coworkers on an individual level. When a position that could otherwise reasonably be filled by an American is gated for any unnecessary reason, be it undesirable pay or excessively specific requirements or whatever else, that effectively removes that position from the domestic job market. When that is repeated many times the end result is the same number of domestic applicants competing for fewer positions. That results in downward pressure due to basic supply and demand.

That's fine if there's a genuine need for a specific sort of specialist and the US simply isn't producing enough of them. But when it's silly hyper specific requirements it becomes detrimental.

tech salaries have only increased and never decreased. Not in 2000, not in 2008, not in 2020.

Your narrative runs against the facts on the ground.

Not only foreign workers were part of the reason US tech dominates the world, they also greatly contributed to every single major invention in tech, including the Attention paper which led to Transformer based LLMs.

All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives are exploiting either ignorance (foreigners undercut wages, while wages have tripled and more) or motte-and-bailey tactics (WITCH bad and H1B fraud bad, lets abolish all immigration)

That's highly deceptive. To start with, salaries have to increase just to tread water given inflation. Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with a position that produces a large amount of value being compensated in accordance. If a particular sector does well we should expect salaries to rise relative to the economy as a whole.

The question is simply whether a policy would depress wages relative to not having that policy, and it's merely one of many factors that should be carefully considered when weighing the costs and benefits.

> All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives

You reveal your own biases. Personally I'm originally from academia. I'm accustomed to a workplace where citizens are only barely a majority and of those many are naturalized immigrants. I have no qualms with importing labor that's significantly more skilled than the average american in cases where doing so benefits our society on the whole. Neither do I have qualms with filling jobs that are legitimately unwanted or that we truly don't have sufficient local talent to support. However I'll note that the last one there is exceedingly rare.

"We were unable to attract highly experienced data analysts, and we REFUSE to ever train anyone for any role, so we should be allowed to use scab labor to undercut American wages"

I have replied to another comment - we ended up hiring a fresh graduate with relevant research experience who is being trained for the role.

Were you actually involved in the hiring? What is qualified? College degree and $30/hr?

I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me

Does your wife's consultancy business have a growing number of clients to handle? It might also be an issue of distribution.

No such issues. It's actually not a solo business, it's a civil/geological engineering consultancy firm with a mix of state/local government and private clients.

We need to incentivize more kids to get pavement design degrees to increase the supply

The reason US is in this mess is because in the 50s and 60s there was a liberal arts education boom in the US, and STEM education boom in India/China.

Anyone educated in the 50s and 60s has retired

And in China they were far more occupied with a cultural revolution than any form of advanced education. At best you could argue that they were teaching basic literacy to more people.

We had a STEM education boom in the last decade in the US

Capitalism has an answer for that ... it's called "higher salary."

Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.

Pay more.

But you Americans hate taxes. You spend like a European country and tax like an African one.

I have added compensation information in another reply.

And you pay for this, how? Because typically that would mean taxing something more.

I've seen those kind of proposals as ballot measures that get voted down.

Tough. The undesirable consequences needs to be forced to occur so that the voters have no choice but to deal with it. You shouldn't get to just rip the bottom out of the market and proclaim to have fixed the problem.

Rural Alaska is a special kind of rural that most people won't take to. Communities off the road where you fly in on a small plane, take a river boat, or snow machine in the winter to get there. Most are tribal and insular. Getting anyone to move there is a big ask. For a H1B teacher it is a foot in the door.

I think a lot of people don't understand how different it is to live in rural communities in general, and then to your point, how much more extreme rural Alaska is than "regular" rural areas.

I live in rural California. During the pandemic, a lot of people moved here and didn't last six months before leaving (I can relate, there's a lot I miss about living in SF!). There are so many services people expect, and they expect them to be prompt. We have the opposite of economies of scale in our small town. We have zero options for meal delivery. The nearest full size grocery is a 20-30 minute drive. Costco and Trader Joe's are a 90 minute drive. There are so few auto mechanics around that many of us drive 90 minutes for car service if we don't do it ourselves. Power outages often last 3-10 days. Large snow storms (4+ feet) typically make our roads impassable for 3-7 days. When the power goes out, internet follows 90 minutes later. There's no cell coverage inside or out, even when the power is on.

All of that is worse in almost all of Alaska. My brother worked on Alaska's North Slope for a few years - if you've ever seen the TV show Ice Road Truckers, that was his job. They'd fly him up north for a 1-2 week long shift, then fly him back to the little town he lived in for a week-long break. You have to worry about crazy things like hoping the summer doesn't get too warm, because roads will melt and collapse into what was previously permafrost. Uh oh, someone left a loading bay door in the warehouse open and now there's a polar bear in there breaking expensive stuff. Then you go home and can't go inside because a moose decided to go to sleep right in front of your door - better drive 50 miles and fuel up because you might be sleeping in your vehicle tonight and you don't want to freeze to death if your fuel runs out. These are all things my brother experienced. The pay was great, but he finally gave up and moved to Anchorage to drive a truck locally there.

But evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.

Rural Alaska... Just about the most inhospitable climate in the US, remote, and with a very high cost of living. Teachers can find work just about anywhere, they have little incentive to stay in Alaska.

The solution for this is simple - pay them more. There are plenty of recently graduated teachers who would work in Alaska for a few years if it paid off their student loans or let them save up a down payment on a house.

Alaska will already pay off loans for teachers that will teach in rural communities. My friend taught in Yakutat for 5 years to pay off loans before moving to a larger town. But Yakutat is well connected as far as rural towns go. They have jet service and a ferry in the summer. Not many takers to go live in a tribal town 200 miles up a river.

And who pays that extra? Who are you taxing in the middle of nowhere?

The Alaska Permanent Fund from their oil revenue is worth $90 billion and they send every resident an annual $1,000 check on top of heavily subsidized fuel. I think they can pay competitive teacher salaries.

Alaska is already in the top 8 median elementary school teacher salaries nationally, with ~$79,260 in 2025 compared to 2024 national median of $62,310 (couldn't find 2025). They were #2 and #3 in education spending as a percent of state GDP in 2024 and 2025. [1][2][3]

It would need to be more than just competitive, it would probably need to be doctor-tier "I'm giving up my life plans for this salary in Alaska" level (which is what I assume it's like for foreign labor).

It's possible they can afford it. I would think they would need to double or more their education spending (~$2.77 billion (24/25), ~45% -> wages) state wide which would be most of what the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out per year ($3-4 billion) [4][5]

I imagine it would be politically very unpopular for obvious reasons.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...

[2] https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/?major_group=250000&occupati... (increase records to see Alaska)

[3] https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2024

https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2025

[4] https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2025/06/alaskas-schools-are-ro...

[5] https://apfc.org/the-fund/fund-structure/

The Alaska Permanent Fund is not a general government account. It is legally separate from state government funds.

there is already a program like that, its been running for ages, its called PLSF. Still not enough teachers.

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...

People who critique H1B always seem to assume that people actually hiring for labor are much dumber than those bright commenters and haven't exhausted each and every other opportunity to find qualified people.

No, you are not being smarter than lawmakers who enacted H1B program, and then refused to dismantle it at every opportunity to do so. You are not smarter than employers who have to hire via H1B and pay tens of thousands dollars to immigration lawyers for stupid paperwork.

Most of the critique of H1B in this post is just bigoted, hateful, and uneducated rant

you said "smarter" in this comment when a more accurate term is "corrupt". Being unable to find a candidate for your given budget requires that you either increase the budgeted salary or decrease the requirements, and train on the job. If you cannot do either of these, your company MUST fail. It is inhumane to demolish the US working class by importing foreign scab labor. Too much labor supply (aka immigration) decreases fair market value for wages. That alone is more than enough justification for ending all immigration of any significant amount.

Handwaving away significant issues as "bigotry, etc" is unhelpful to the discussion. We haven't even covered the impact on housing supply, as illustrated by Canada's insane valuations.

What are the knock on effects of lowering the total number of people/the velocity of money/the number of companies in America?

Canada's housing supply cost issues are driven by a wide variety of factors, very little having to do with immigration and far more with a small number of wealthy families owning a huge amount of land and a larger number of wealthy people holding many homes.

OpenAI and Anthropic and others are paying millions to hire qualified people, yet they still have to hire H1Bs.

Dont tell me there are no Americans willing to take a million dollar job and these foreigners are causing wage decreases, despite tech salaries showing only increasing trend. Theres never been a year when tech salaries have decreased, not in 2008, not in 2000, not in 2020.

Its all hockey stick growth for tech people.

Housing supply is blocked by American citizens, mostly boomers, who oppose any development and oppose public transit. You cant blame foreigners for something that your fellow citizens are doing

Re Canada: I believe there is strong money laundering money flow in Canadian RE that has nothing to do with immigration. Its all illicit money being laundered by Canadians themselves

Hardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.

It's literally exactly the argument.

If teachers were underpaid - it would be a poor argument.

But if there's an acute shortage of 'key' workers in jobs that require education, for jobs where wages are materially above market pricing - then this is where you want H1B type programs.

The idea is that it should not harm the local market for labour, and it's usually not reasonable to expect market wages to be a radical departure from where they would be otherwise.

Aka - if teachers are earning $80K on average, then it's not going to work out i some small towns need to pay $150K to bring people in from the city, it also creates problems for locals.

Special worker programs can be well utilized here in the right circumstances.

The 'bad' scenario is when labour market is flooded where those jobs would otherwise go to locals.

Tata/Infosys (generic IT workers) are alone probably 80% of the problem.

This would hold more weight if teachers in rural areas weren't getting paid less than half your thought experiment average.

Your little comment would have more weight it had any factual substance.

Average teachers salary in US is 75K and it's over 100K in California.

[1]https://www.nea.org/nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teac...

Averages can be deceiving when you have large outliers boosting it. A median would be more enlightening. Also California is one of the most expensive states in the US and the average starting pay for California teachers is 58k. And for that be the average there are people making significantly less than that which means many are making barely above the California minimum wage.

Teachers are underpaid. No occupation paying under median wage in the area should be granted work visa.

'Teachers are underpaid' is a qualitative statement, separate from what is 'median wage'.

Teachers earn about the median wage in the US and slightly above the median wage in California and Alaska.

I think that pay structure is about right and given the way education is paid for and lack of willingness of people to move to rural areas, H1 seems about right for acute cases and specialized subjects.

If you can't get a physics teacher to move to 'Wherever Alaska' - you have a problem.

It’s a matter of incentives. The avg American grows up with certain “American dream” that clashes with that rural America life. There is no incentive to leave everything behind and go be basically alone. Immigrants have a “lower” baseline or just want the experience of being abroad, or are willing to put up with rural living because from wherever they are, it looks better. You’d have to entice a city teacher to move to rural America.

You’ll say “pay them more”. But who are you taxing more? Because no one is happy when the gov starts looking at being more efficient and starts laying off some admin people either.

Teachers were like 4% of all H1Bs. Using CS/AI H1B proceeds to increase pay to rural teachers more seems like a no-brainer. The current Alaskan teacher pay seems to be below median, which seems like an good threshold to disallow H1B workers altogether.

Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ?

H1B proceeds go to fund USCIS and its staff, they do not go towards local school districts.

This whole discussion is full of racists and haters who dont know anything about the subject beyond clickbait titles

Are teaching and software engineering even job categories that overlap enough that they should compete for the same pool of visas?

It seems to me things would be better if they were classified as different visa categories.

so you want to leave rural children without teachers?

I think the commenter is volunteering to go themselves.

Remind me who is at the forefront of cutting funding to government programs.

The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?

It’s not the job, it’s the location.

There is a shortage of most careers that require and college degree in rural areas.

Also, rural areas don’t have the tax base to out pay urban areas.

This is about the stagnation and lack of vitality in rural towns in general.

Er, there is an excess of teachers because they are paid so poorly. Teaching (like nursing) is absolutely a labor of love and so they are heavily undervalued and underpaid in this country.

> No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.

Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.

And it's not just education - nurses, doctors, and plenty of engineers in the Energy, Mining, and Construction sector are also brought on H1Bs to Alaska.

Edit: can't reply

> Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects

Yes.

I have a good buddy of mine who is senior management at an ANRC and they will pay 6 figure salaries to non-natives irrespective of citizenship in a number of cases.

Heck, even the starting salary for unskilled federal roles like TSA agents at Utquiatvik was $70K last I was there versus $30-40k in the rest of the mainland.

Much of Alaska is literal villages that are disconnected from the outside world aside from the occasional bush plane, and amenities are nonexistent. You are talking about towns and villages where most of the residents are entirely depending on UBI (Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) and subsidence hunting/farming.

As such, it's not enticing.

Also, a number of Alaska Natives prefer hiring Thai and Filipino immigrants over Americans (who statistically tend to be White, Black, or Hispanic) because if you're hiring outsiders you may as well hire outsiders who look like you and are viewed as more culturally aligned.

Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects?

Yeah, most of us think of tech, but the program affects doctors, nurses and teachers for rural America.

This was the most infuriating part.

Big Tech has multiple carveouts to bring tech labor using F1/J1/L1/O1/EB-1 and various other visas, and they wouldn't even feel the 100k fee given their budgets.

While non-tech sectors were the ones most affected

Not refuting your point but...

Most people who work in tech are not eligible for O1 or EB-1. F1 is a student visa, J1 requires you to go back after finishing your stuff. L1 can actually work but needs to be converted to either H1b, O1 or EB1 at some point soonish.

Plenty of people in tech work on O1 and EB1. F1 is probably the biggest feeder pool for H1. J1 does not always require coming back, it requires return only when funded by US government program, and return requirement can otherwise can be waived, esp if J1 is unfinished

> it requires return only when funded by US government program

Not true, I had J1 visas without US government program intervention and I still had the home requirement. Since there wasn't any US government intervention I was able to get a waiver for the home requirement, but it took a couple of months.

Which is sadly very ironic.

Isn't the entire point of this order to prevent filling low-paying jobs with cheap foreign labor, in order to increase demand for domestic labor? "Rural district schoolteacher" sounds like exactly the kind of job where the H1B program has very low public support

You have been terribly misled.

Not from USA, is there shortage of teachers in USA? Or government pays too little to have local teachers consider such jobs? Seems like a broken system

> is there shortage of teachers in USA?

No, there is a steady stream of teachers being fed into the maw of public education. The pay is low and job security is terrible until you get tenure. My wife was a teacher; I have heard horror stories.

You get paid based on a combination of how much money you earn your employer and how easy you are to replace. Schools get paid by taxes, and there are a ton of them produced every year. So, the pay is abysmal.

My gf makes about $90k a year, tons of time off, at 35 years old in a California public school. If she wasn't a teacher, she admits she'd probably be a cop or 911 dispatcher, because government gigs are what her entire extended family recommends. She has trouble adding 50 cents to 75 cents, but luckily she only teaches English and social studies to middle schoolers.

I have a kid who just graduated elementary and is about to enter Middle school.

Your post actually explains why every single classmate of my daughter has enrolled in private middle school ($50k+ tuition), despite being in the best school district (Palo Alto School District).

Apparently public middle schools are really bad in California, but you can still find decent high and elementary schools

All top private middle schools in the bay are oversubscribed and cannot accomodate everyone, and require ridiculous exams and admission process that rivals Ivy League, situation is really bad, and demand for good teachers is infinite

What happened was there were a lot of boomers that taught my generation in the bay area. So when I was in high school around 94-98 the teachers were typically 40-50ish year old boomer generation. These people were pretty good at teaching. Mostly white. As generation X started getting into the game, and bureaucratic processes the introduced "core" and "new math". Both pretty bad. I was in the middle of the transition so I did get pre-new-math as well.

What happened next? Well pretty much all of us got jobs at Google, Apple and other places. The only way for any of us to have stayed in teaching would have been major compromises. We decimated the teaching industry because it didn't realize the salaries these companies were waiting to pay us. They had no chance.

This situation rhymes with manufacturing jobs in the midwest.

Industrial and manufscturing jobs were offshored to Asia and Americans had zero chance to be price competitive relative to East-Asian labor

The diff is that Midwest didnt have Apple and Google to fall back on, they only had fentanyl to cope with their situation.

But now the situation is so bad, you cant even find talent in US even if you are willing to pay for it. Asian countries have better integrated supply chains that make manufacturing two to three orders cheaper than in US.

And nobody knows how to solve it, but there is only one solution.

End the USD as a global reserve currency, so that manufacturing in US has more power again, relative to financial industry. I dont see any other option long term

I like the girl but I can't help but dislike what her and her social circle are doing to schools. I go to their social events after hours for happy hour or family events and I honestly don't think these people are capable of molding the youth into anything but lame 'nice' kind stupid people. Yes, being nice and kind are important, sure. But you get major problems when these teachers can not inspire or provoke thought. And they can't, because they are honestly borderline retarded. Half the kids are just nodding along, and the other half realize by around 7th grade that their teachers are stupid and start really mistreating them and ignoring them. Its a mess.

> re---ed.

Please stop saying say. It's almost as bad as the n-word. There are a lot of neurodivergent people around here.

I personally like saying the word, but I'll admit this is one of the worse examples I've used in a while. Because I genuinely was trying to imply they were dumb, which makes it a more serious use of the word.

Personally I can't imagine saying that word in reference to anyone with a true disability. In my social circles, retarded is reserved for people acting in dumb ways due to really bad social skills or often even self centeredness or laziness. Using it in regards to the teachers was probably too close to a serious use of it and I shouldnt have. Sorry.

The "Alaska" bit is very important. Very remote, very cold. Everything is very expensive because almost all of it has to be shipped in by air.

Yes, the US teacher pay is generally crap and we're short on teachers everywhere, but Alaska is a rather unique situation.

It's 16% of the US's land area, but only 0.2% of the population.

Rural Alaska is by and large very very remote. Often small plane is the only practical access and then only in favorable weather.

Recruiting teachers to remote villages with extreme weather is hard and if you are at US university training to be a teacher you will probably have other options that are more attractive as a young person.

Even anchorage is pretty bad

Yes, I mean there is basically one road to Alaska and from the nearest major US city (Seattle) it is 3600km to Anchorage…about the same distance as Barcelona to Moscow but entirely through sparsely or unpopulated wilderness.

And Seattle is a long way from most of the US…another 3300km from Chicago.

Teacher pay is low, but it also requires certification and a degree. And in exchange it will be relatively stressful and lacking in prestige.

And long hours!

My favorite teacher strike was when the teachers stopped doing work when they weren't being paid. The district quickly caved.

Little bit of both. Pay varies drastically from state to state, even taking cost of living into account. By the time you pay for a degree and a credential the ROI isn't great. Jobs in better paying areas exist too but are understandably more competitive

Teachers are paid less than they should be and and must complete specific undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as additional ongoing certifications. They are, unfortunately, not well respected by many groups. And right-wing folks have been making noise about augmenting and replacing teachers with AI. I have multiple friends who have left teaching due to lack of respect and support from student parents. I still have two teachers in my family.

Reminds me of the plot from North Exposure.

*Northern Exposure

I’m going to call this one as likely to be overturned on appeal. The Immigration and Naturalization Act provides:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” (INA Section 212(f).)

Congress specifically gave the President the power to make findings and impose conditions, and the APA doesn’t apply to the President. The district court side-steps this by saying that the fee is a tax and 212(f) doesn’t delegate taxing power to the President. But that’s a separation of powers problem, not an APA problem. That is, if the fee was actually a tax, it wouldn’t be permissible even if the President had explained it properly as required by the APA. The executive can’t levy a tax by going through the procedural niceties of the APA. The APA angle is a red herring.

So the real issue is whether the fee is a “tax” that only Congress can levy. I think it’s a fee, not a tax. The Supreme Court has distinguished between user fees and taxes as follows: “We there described ‘fees’ as ‘bestow[ing]’ a reciprocal ‘benefit on the [payor], not shared by other members of society.’ NCTA, 415 U. S., at 341. By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public. Id., at 343.’” (FCC v. Consumers’ Research: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/606/24-354/)

The H1b fee falls squarely within what the Supreme Court has called “fees.” The benefit of being able to bring over a particular foreign worker inures directly to the employer filing the visa petition, not the public at large.

I'm in agreement with your position but I'm confused by the SCOTUS criteria for distinguishing taxes and fees. I follow the reasoning that you receive a tangible benefit as an individual for payment of a fee. That much makes sense to me. However what puzzles me is "By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public." Do not fees also benefit the wider public to the extent that they fund the government? I'm failing to see any difference in that regard.

Whether it is a fee or tax is less about whether it funds the government and more about whether when you pay the amount you get some benefit that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pay (above and beyond compliance with tax law). For example a fishing licence is a fee while a flood levy is a tax.

Yes, I understood that (and stated as much). The first part made sense to me. It is the second that I find perplexing.

> By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public.

That seems to apply to both taxes and fees as far as I can tell. It seems to me that a tax can primarily be distinguished by virtue of not qualifying as a fee. Put another way, are not fees paid to a government a subset of taxes much as squares are a subset of rectangles?

But then sales taxes are fees, no?

No, because the government collecting sales tax isn't a party to the transaction. The fee itself needs to be in exchange for a good, but the government is giving you anything marginal in exchange for sales tax, instead it's going into accounts spent for public good.

It does all seem a bit arbitrary doesn't it? If you frame it as purchasing the privilege of purchasing a certain quantity of arbitrary goods denominated in dollars then it sure looks like a fee. But obviously that isn't what is meant.

At the end of the day shall-issue permits, hyper specialized taxes, and fees all seem to amount to the same thing. However I think you can probably construct a reasonable criteria based on whether or not the other side of the transaction is fulfilled by the government and whether or not it is legal to do the thing by default. By that logic sales taxes and car tabs would indeed be taxes while fishing and camping permits would both be fees.

When you pay income tax (for example), your personal benefit from that tax is no different from my benefit from your income tax. But if you pay a passport fee (for example), you receive a specific benefit that I do not.

Very sharp reading. My quotation presents the two definitions as freestanding. But as you observe, the definition of “tax” isn’t freestanding. There’s additional context, which comes from the fact that this issue only comes up when you’ve got a payment that purports to be for some government benefit. If the government imposes a payment on you in return for nothing then that’s clearly a tax. So, for example, the ACA penalty on uninsured people was a tax.

By contrast, if the government is purporting to charge you a fee in return for some benefit, that can still be a tax when the benefit that you’re getting really is a benefit to the public at large. So you’re comparing the benefit of what you’re supposedly paying for to the benefit to the public at large for operating the government. An example would be the case that alleged that PACER fees for operating the electronic court filing system were impermissible taxes. There, what you’re paying for is putatively access to a specific document. But the cost is ($0.10 per page) is way out of line with how electronic access to documents is normally valued. What you’re really paying for is the existence of the electronic filing system itself, which is something that inures to the benefit of the public at large.

I disagree. Fees have to be justified and USCIS is not spending $100,000 to process a H1B applicant. They are raising revenue. Which is taxation.

Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.

Fees don’t have to be limited to the cost of the specific transaction. Lots of agencies, not to mention the courts themselves, charge fees that go towards the operation of the agency and don’t just defray the specific costs of a single transaction.

In the NCTA case cited above, the Supreme Court upheld a law that authorized the FCC to impose “fees” on cable licensees that took into account the value of the license to the provider. So a fee need not be limited to the cost for an agency to process a license. A charge can be based on the value of the authorization or license provided and still qualify as a fee not a tax. FCC spectrum auctions are another example. The FCC charges billions of dollars for 4G/5G spectrum licenses. That’s based on value of the license to the licensees, not the cost of processing the licenses. Here, the $100k fee easily can be seen as reflecting the value to the employer of being able to hire the foreign worker.

Sure but USCIS is already funded by fees.

https://www.uscis.gov/about-us/budget-planning-and-performan...

it sounds like USCIS should do auctions too. is that not an option, or just nobody bothered with it so far?

> Fees have to be justified

Do they? Honest question. Is there a law that says fees must be in some sense justified?

> Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.

This seems like a nonsense response to GP. They gave a definition of fee vs tax that is based on a meaningful distinction and not what it happens to be called.

> Do they? Honest question. Is there a law that says fees must be in some sense justified?

Read the opinion, it isn’t very long. This facet in particular is discussed in detail there.

> They gave a definition of fee vs tax that is based on a meaningful distinction and not what it happens to be called.

GP sounds likes he’s trying out for the inevitable appeal, the tax/fee distinctions argued in the case came from different case law.

From what I can tell with a quick reading, it is not. The opinion states that the fee is a tax and not a penalty and based on that ruling then further rules that the tax oversteps Congress’s delegated authority.

The whole penalty thing seems weird because obviously it’s not a penalty, so I don’t know if the president’s lawyers argued a dumb point and lost or if I’m missing some legal nuance here.

Regardless, the opinion is based on the ruling that the fee amounts to a tax, not that fees must be justified.

Page 18 and ff.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.293...

> I don’t know if the president’s lawyers argued a dumb point and lost

They argued several dumb points, you’ll have to narrow it down.

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Page 18 is the tax vs penalty discussion I referred to.

> They argued several dumb points, you’ll have to narrow it down.

Arguing that the fee is a “penalty” in this case seems pointlessly dumb.

Seems like they should have argued the fee a “fee”.

There is actually a sensible way to do recruit foreign workers to fill jobs that locals for some reason can't fill, and it's just a few miles up north...

Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is not limited by annual caps or lotteries. You just apply (as a company) by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable. I've hired many people through this program to fill a variety of roles over the years, and all of them eventually became citizens too. Once you're on Canadian soil as a TFW, moving toward permanent residency is not very difficult if you're a skilled worker with enough "points" (based on education, etc.).

Some argue (perhaps correctly) that the TFWP suppresses Canadian wages and productivity growth by flooding the labour market with cheap staff from poor countries. And there is likely some truth to that. But when I hear how many hoops my US colleagues have to jump through with lawyers and such to bring skilled employees in, it boggles my mind. If the Americans were to implement a more modern temporary foreign worker program similar to what Canada has, you'd have to imagine the US economy would boom like it never has.

Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a horrible program that has been flagrantly abused for years to the detriment of Canadians. There's record high youth unemployment yet every Tim Hortons is filled with Indians.

Yes, you'll be hard pressed to find any Canadians at any fast food restaurants now. It's a common scam to pay a Tim Hortons owner 20-30k and he'll make you a manager at the franchise, then he'll give you a shared room where you pay monthly to live there. Then you work for free. The UN literaly wrote how Canada has created a neo-slavery system.

Is there any evidence that this actually takes place in a consistent, widespread manner?

No. This is one of many right wing conspiracies floating around in the social media era.

I'm not sure whether you're aware of how racist this comment may sound to many readers here on HN, but you're definitely echoing the sentiment of many Canadians who sense that "foreigners" are taking away their jobs - a concept that has been leveraged by conservative politicians to stoke distaste for the current government. There is indeed a lack of youth employment in Canada, and the TFWP may be somewhat to blame for that. But labelling it as a problem with regard to a single group of immigrants strikes me as unhelpful.

What's wrong with Indians? Why do so many people here want us to hate on Indians?

It has become a norm on the internet. Even calling it out is usually met with downvotes, name-calling, and more hateful replies.

There’s nothing wrong with Indians. Indian immigrants I’ve worked with professionally have been great.

There’s something massively wrong with bringing over tons of cheap labour, who are themselves constantly exploited and abused due to their precarious arrangement, creating a situation where they have no reason to care about the society or culture they’re moving into, because it obviously doesn’t care about them.

They are lied to, cheated from, and stolen from, and are the victims of racism. In turn, a disproportionate number of them will lie, cheat, steel, and exercise racism, or casteism. That’s not specific to Indians, that’s just human nature. As a result, the trust level in society is collapsing.

The Indians are not the source of the problem here, the businesses and politicians who created this environment are. The Indians are another group of victims. They are sold false promises and set up for exploitation, and desperate people in an insecure position are not a good foundation for a healthy society.

Indians are victims, and in order to protect them we must deny them the ability to move and work?

Oh wont somebody please think of the Tim Hortons.

There’s nothing remotely sensible about what Canada has done to allow Indian ethnic cartels to take over their job market

> by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable

This is anathema to tech H1B abusers, which is why they post these jobs in obscure print publications no one reads, to deliberately conceal their existence, while meeting the legal requirement.

Unfortunately for them, they cannot treat domestic workers as chattel, which is the inconvenient truth in most cases.

You're confusing H1B with PERM. H1B has no job posting requirements.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...

There must be a better way to prevent the consulting firms from abusing this program

Two rules:

1. No subcontracting. Visa recipients must work directly for the visa sponsor.

2. No layoffs. Any company that does a mass layoff is banned from sponsoring new visas for 5 years.

There is no abuse. That's why tech companies recruit for software positions in the back pages of a gay mag in Salt Lake City and require resumes sent by postal mail.

Disqualify consulting firms from "hiring" H-1Bs. You should be employed directly by the business needing the skilled guest worker.

There are multiple [0], but the announcement of this policy helped overshadow the announcement of the Trump Gold Card at the exact same time [1].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312908

[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...

Only allow American firms to use H1-B. Most of the H1-B abuse is from the Indian 'WITCH' companies. Why foreign firms are allowed to hire foreign workers in the US is beyond me. For training / administration, there should be another visa type which does not confer family benefits and cannot progress to greencard or whatever.

BUT... at the end of the day, the solution must be passed by congress. Have we all forgotten about Congress since they stopped doing anything?

All of them have US subsidiaries and Cognizant is an US listed company.

I mean ... Come on we know what's really going on here.

Rigorous examinations for English fluency and for competency in their alleged field of expertise would be a good start. I have several H1B coworkers in the US who barely speak intelligible English, and who barely understand normal conversation let alone anything technical. A blatant example of this that I experienced recently being that several of them could not understand that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order.

This is a hiring issue, not a legal one. The US has no official language, and no language tests, so requiring English in law would be dicey to put it mildly. What if I'm hiring someone specifically to work at a Spanish language news outlet?

The H-1B visa is specifically for hiring "highly specialized" workers. Lack of the supposed skills that let them across the border is in fact a legal issue.

H1Bs are not hired for their knowledge of english, however you can define it. They are hired for specialized occupational skills

Skills which, with very few exceptions, are conducted in English.

You don’t need to be Shakespeare to do specialized job that’s first

Second most visa applicants already get tested on their English skill when they apply for Visa, for example, universities require English proficiency for F1 visa using GRE exam

And why do you think you are better than an employer in assessing required English proficiency of an employee

>for example, universities require English proficiency for F1 visa using GRE exam

Why would the universities fail them on these exams, when it would mean losing out on that sweet, sweet tuition money?

But Visa applications need to prove English proficiency already. So it's somehow neither here nor there.

> This is a hiring issue, not a legal one.

When the law specifically dictates stuff like the talent of the person, I’m not convinced you’re correct.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/desi...

EO 14224 designates English as the official language of the US.

Which is clearly illegal.

Congress would need to declare any official language(s). Moreover, by treaty and law (NALA of 1990) obligations to Native American tribes there must be more languages than merely English.

>and no language tests

English test is a requirement for naturalization, which is governed by the same INA, which governs H1B and other visas.

>What if I'm hiring someone specifically to work at a Spanish language news outlet?

Having actually worked at a Spanish language news outlet before (1 of 4 tv and radio stations in the office I was doing IT help desk work in), I can tell you that every single employee spoke English somewhere on the level of very good to near native fluency. As it turns out, knowing English (or the native language of whatever country you're in) is an incredible value-multiplier for almost every job position imaginable.

As far as language issues at my current job goes, it turns out once you hire a manager that speaks both Hindi and English (or Marathi and English, or Bengali and English, you get the picture) it doesn't matter much if the H1Bs he hires barely speak English because he can just start shouting at them in Hindi if they don't understand (even if several native English speakers are in the meeting too).

Again, this is a hiring issue, not a legal one. You want to make it against the law for your boss to hire bad managers?

No, that's a silly test. If I want to bring in a world renown battery expert from China, it's ridiculous to also add on "and you must speak English well". English fluency has absolutely nothing to do with expertise.

What we actually need is a higher minimum salary for H1B employees. Right now it's something like 50k per year, which is insanely low for a "hard to find expert" it should be more like $300k per year. H1B employees should be some of the best paid employees in a company. Raise that minimum salary and you'll overnight fix almost all complaints with the H1B program. Except for from the business owners who are abusing the system to get cheap labor.

Hah. And you think a Govt agency will be able to do a rigorous enough examination to eliminate people who don't know that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order?

Reminds me of a friend whose job application got rejected by some Govt agency in Canada due to "experience mismatch." Job required "Software Programmer" experience but he was a "Software Engineer" instead.

> could not understand that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order.

Want to bet how many naturally born US citizens in your colleagues can answer the question in a technical interview?

I'm not expecting them to know it ahead of time, I'm expecting them to understand it when it is explained to them.

Many of the people I grew up with "barely speak intelligible English". Communication is important and the easiest way to fix that is to bring people from your linguistic group to be a coworker....

Any legal barrier will just be cheated around.

> I have several H1B coworkers in the US who barely speak intelligible English, and who barely understand normal conversation let alone anything technical.

English fluency is certainly not a requirement for fluency in any technical field. Perhaps you mean that they cannot understand _your_ descriptions of technical topics, though

Seeing as my Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Mexican, French Canadian, and Brazilian coworkers don't seem to have these issues with me I don't think the issue is with my explanations.

Funny, when I was in the US, my Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Mexican, French, British, and 99% of the American coworkers had absolutely zero issues with my Indian accent, except that one American guy who would ask me to keep repeating even though the rest of the room had already understood and processed what I said.

The problem likely lies deeper than just the accents; and by the way, the English requirement (including a verbal test) is already set in place for most of the workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, and in the non-university hiring pipelines I have seen, the English/ESL tests seem to be common if you are not from an English-speaking country, so if you are seeing people where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a better look at your employer's hiring practices.

Sorry I didn’t mean you specifically, rather you as an English speaker

Why don't they just auction H1B visas?

1. Set a monthly quota (for argument's sake, 5000 a month).

2. Each month the government holds an auction, and businesses that believe they need to bring in foreign labour can bid for however many visas they want.

3. The highest bidding companies get the visas.

This way the government can control how many foreign workers come in to the country each year, and the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.

It also means that the limited number of available H1B visas are put towards their highest value use. The company that wants to bring in a highly skilled foreign worker that's worth $500,000 in additional profit to them will be willing to bid up to $499,999 for their visa. The company that wants to bring in another Tim Hortons worker won't be able to outbid them.

Because the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.

Why can’t Americans do these jobs?

Being deported if you get fired is a basic job requirement. Keeps people in line.

Americans can't compete with that.

Well they can compete with that.

Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right? If you're going to take this wildly cynical approach you should at least do a more proper comparison....

I think forcing this comparison shows a lack of empathy for how compromised of a position the H1B really is.

If I lose my job I have unemployment insurance, cobra benefits, personal savings, and I don’t require another employer to sponsor my visa. If I lose my job the most likely outcome is I find another one after searching a few months.

If someone on an H1B visa loses their job the most likely outcome is they are forced to leave the country.

Well, truthfully I don't really care all that much about it any more than I do any other problems that people generally experience. It's even more tragic that someone has an H1B means other folks don't - aren't their lives even worse for not having the opportunity that someone else does? Can the H1B visa holder even compete with the person denied the H1B?

The reason I wrote this comment is because the OP itself decided it was warranted with this cynical comment to suggest Americans don't work hard because oh if they get fired well they just find another job but the H1B visa holder gets gasp deported. But this itself diminishes the stresses and experience of those who don't find that other job, or don't find that replacement tech job, or any other devastating affects that someone experiences from job loss. Yea you might have a few months of COBRA benefits, but then what? You might not even have any savings because of some emergency that occurred. What's worse, being deported after a couple of months or becoming homeless in America? What if you're deported to Australia or Japan? Why are you or others assuming a happy ending for someone laid off in America but assuming the worst case scenario for an H1B visa holder and then comparing the two in that way?

Yeah, sounds like your situation is insecure too. That really sucks.

That's not correct lol

I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.

Unless Americans does not want this type of job, which actually validates your cynical interpretation of OP's comment. Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.

> I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.

Why can't the H1B visa holder also just be deported and drive for Uber in their home country full-time until the market recovers?

> Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.

As a capitalist I'm all in favor of driving wages for workers to as close to 0 as possible. If Uber is $1 for me instead of $15 that's great. I don't think our unions or blue-collar workforce are in favor of that though.

> Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right?

I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least, and you can save up as a countermeasure to the loss of the paycheck. Bad as it is it's not comparable to getting deported after a couple of months.

Hard to say how directly they can compare, and it probably depends on the individual situation and of course their line of work and other such items. In the woe-is-me olympics they both seem pretty awful and, one might even say, competitive in terms of how awful they are. Maybe being deported means you go back to France or Canada or something.

> I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least

Yes, but often you will have to pay the full cost in order to do so, which will be difficult for many people after having lost their source of income..

First, I think the H1B does need genuine reform to keep the big companies from gaming the lottery system.

Having said that, I’m not sure banning H1Bs or immigrants in general is going to help American workers. Take tech for instance. Many tech leaders are immigrants. If they hasn’t taken in the Jensen Huang’s, Sergei Brin’s, Sundar Pichai, etc… the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere. It’s amazing how immigrants have shaped the US tech scene:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/06/03/immig...

Second, when you ban immigrants/H1B, companies get around the ban by outsourcing to foreign countries.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2017/06/10/if-yo...

The 45th president was supposed to deliver that reform. Then they went all out and... commissioned a study. Then they did nothing, once the puppet masters let it be know they didn't want to lose their servile work force chained to their visas with a green card dangled in front of them.

Anti-immigration policy blocks them from being Americans.

I know an awful lot of skilled people that live in the US, pay high taxes, and for whose lives have been thrown into disarray by backwards, anti-immigration policy like this illegal $100k fee, but it's just the beginning of the ways that anti-immigration policy is being used to make the US far weaker, just in order for pyrrhic harm to immigrants. I'm pissed about it.

> I know an awful lot of skilled people that live in the US

If they already live in the US, they're not applying for an H1B.

That's false. You can apply for an H1B while in the US (unless there has been another recent and random change to long standing policy for no reason except to make lives miserable).

H1B renewals are also common, and happen within the US.

>Anti-immigration policy blocks them from being Americans.

Yes, because the citizens of a country (through their elected representatives) have absolute control over who they choose to allow into their country. Even blocking a brilliant surgeon or inventor, if they so choose. There is no moral right to come to America (or any other country).

Saying "I have absolute control" is not a justification for making bad decisions that hurt the US. Furthermore, it was never a question of the US had a right to make these decisions, of course it does.

Do you find the argument "I have the right to make any decision I want therefor it justifies bad decisions" convincing? I sure don't.

Bad decision for who? Their best interest is not your interest, no matter how you browbeat them.

>Saying "I have absolute control" is not a justification for making bad decisions that hurt the US.

How is it a bad decision that will hurt the US? Can you make that argument on its merits? No one doubts that there isn't that one genius here or there

Last year, right here on HN I saw a headline where the "powers that be" wanted to increase Canada's population to 100 million (they currently sit at 30ish million). Is that a good decision for Canada? Where the fertility rate is so low population is shrinking? Like, do they need another 65 million people? Are there 65 million jobs going undone in Canada right now? Jobs that desperately need doing? The plan's the same for the United States, even if no one was careless enough to blare a similar headline from trumpets.

TFA is about teachers in Alaska. I'm guessing from a brief skim that no Americans want to be school teachers in Alaska for the money local school boards are offering.

This actually highlights two dumb things about the USA: prejudice against immigrants, and unwillingness to fund education.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, if you don't allow immigration. Schools will have to pay more for teachers, which will raise salaries for native born teachers, instead of paying a lower rate to someone on a temporary work visa.

The matter is a little more complicated than that, because Alaska also has some of the nation's most stringent licensure requirements with no alternative routes for high-demand low-supply subject area teachers. You could probably relax those artificial barriers to employment and get more Alaskans teaching without raising the salary as much as if you kept the licensure requirements. You could also promise student debt relief for teachers who serve in rural areas for a certain length of time.

>student debt relief

It already exists its called PSLF

Alaska is already one of the top states for educator pay, and as you know how US government has continioualy failed to solve problems by throwing more money at it, you know more money will simply cause more general inflation and will never solve it.

US already spends more for education with worse results

> unwillingness to fund education.

"The United States spent $15,500 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 38 percent higher than the average of OECD countries3 reporting data ($11,300). The United States had the fifth highest expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level in 2019 after Luxembourg, Norway ($18,000), and Austria and the Republic of Korea ($15,900 each)."

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

Do you want to move to Alaska, and rural Alaska at that (although even “cities” in Alaska are rural by most standards)? You get to be thousands of miles from your existing community, you won’t have a grocery store nearby, there may even be no way to get into or out of your village except by plane. Maybe in the winter you’ll be totally snowed in for weeks at a time.

You could offer me twice what I make as a software engineer and I wouldn’t take the job.

Maybe there aren't a ton of people in Alaska?

Because they were laid off?

We can, that's not the purpose of this.

They arent capable.

Because in America, the boomers' retirement accounts are partially funded by insane college tuition (through insane college services and textbooks), so college has essentially become a guaranteed debt trap that gives you a lottery ticket to maybe be in the top 1%.

They can, which is why many companies do the bare minimum malicious compliance to claim thet they attempted to hire Americans for these jobs. Things like ads in the local newspaper that 99% of qualified Americans will never see:

https://www.newsweek.com/h1b-job-ads-green-cards-targeted-im...

Those newspaper tech job ads have been going on for at least the last... 20 years. When you see those, the company already has the role filled, they just need a justification for the visa. "We tried to find a US worker but failed!" Which honestly may or may not be true, I think the ad is just standard procedure at this point.

Fraud and dishonesty is the SOP. Whole thing needs to be burned down.

If you are willing to discuss and argue with arguments, I can prove that the whole critique of H1B is nothing more than racism, hatred, and bigotry, from the people who are worst and least qualified to talk about the subject

Surely the malicious compliant job ads are proof positive that everything is above board.

job ads in local paper are requirement by the DOL.

it is a goodwill compliance, not malicious. You are again just being racist and uneducated about the subject and reasons for that requirement

We have very different ideas of what 'goodwill' looks like.

the newspaper ad is not for H1B, it is for PERM process, which is different.

Second, the local newspaper requirement is created by the Dept of Labor itself, specifically to protect local workers in the area where Labor Market Test is being done!!!

It is not malicious compliance by firms, it is goodwill compliance by firms, to whatever DOL requires them to do. Dont like it? ask your DOL why.

Third, paper ads create audit trail that DOL wants, they dont recognize e-boards like linkedin/indeed as their audit trail is considered "soft"

They post the jobs in physical newspaper classifieds in the middle of nowhere, and do not post the job on their normal website, because if they posted a real job they would get hundreds of applicants immediately. It’s a fraud but it was tolerated until recently

The H1B visa is explicitly designed for high skill (high paying) jobs which companies have (supposedly) demonstrated they cannot find enough citizen workers.

There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.

You could also just have a more proactive government which punishes businesses for abusing the visa category.

"Immigrants taking good jobs" isn't an immigrant problem, it's a big-business problem

>There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.

The Trump admin already did that too:

https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-pro...

It's more alarming that US doesn't have enough skilled teachers in the nation that we have to hire from overseas.

Education is an investment to the future generation and must not be overlooked.

That’s not even remotely the case. We just don’t have enough people willing to move to rural Alaska.

I'm sure the supply will go up if extra $$$ is paid.

I really think y’all are underestimating the reality of living in rural Alaska. I wouldn’t take a job there unless I had literally no other livable options.

Except you'll have to spend way more than $100,000 to incentify US citizen from a city to move there and stay.

And they not gonna have the same near slave H1B conditions where changing their job is just impossible..

H1B workers in IT even have an option to find a new visa sponsor, but nobody needs foreign teacher with H1B in California or Texas or basically anywhere else.

I have to wonder if some kind of fly in fly out arrangement like is used for a lot of other jobs in undesirable locations would work. I've got a friend who's a nurse/paramedic in an indigenous community in the australian outback, and he works 6 weeks in the community with a per diem and company house, and then has 6 weeks to travel or live in Brisbane between stints. A school could do quarterly swaps of teachers, so there's a Q1/Q3 teacher and a Q2/Q4 teacher each working 9 weeks at a time.

$100K would certainly garner tons of prospects. Rural schools around me only pay $30K

Not sure Alaska with it's threadbare tax regime is going to do that.

...for the given price.

Heaven forbid we could pay better! Something something market signals... not like Alaska is hurting for money.

The gnashing of teeth and “you couldn’t pay me enough to live there” comments are EXACTLY why I like living up here.

Good. I’m totally fine with whiners self-selecting out of the state.

Also? I’ve worked in rural Alaska. It’s not nearly so bad as the people on here would say.

Worth mentioning that I’m also for no real restrictions on immigration either. Bring on the H1Bs up here, we could use the help.

Also a ruling in Boston:

https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is...

> BOSTON, June 8 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday struck down a $100,000 fee U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, concluding that it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized.

> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas, which tech companies in particular rely heavily on to bring on foreign workers.

H1B is a terrible and maximally abused program in its current form. Adding a $100k fee (which I expect eventually to be found to be not-a-tax and therefore legal) is not a fix, it is merely a revenue stream.

It needs a couple things:

1. Break current gamification of lottery winners. Probably by requiring a greater diversity in country-of-origin of H1B visas granted annually. Probably involves some kind of % or per country cap. 2. Better wage protection for US workers in the minimum salary requirements. H1B is ostensibly to address skills gaps but is actually an sub-competitive wage scheme.

People talk about H1B visas solving certain problems but inevitably the problems it solves is keeping wages low. For instance, imagine if rural teachers were paid like tech workers or crab fishermen. The draw would pull from across the country. Like tech workers and crab fishermen.

- Say that no more than 5% of a company, rounded up, can be H-1b. Ex If you have 1-20 employees, only 1 can be an h-1b. Adjust the % based on how well the policy works.

- give companies less power over h-1b holders. Make it last six months or a year after the date they get fired, so they are not so tied down. Don’t make it indentured servitude.

ctrl+f "diversity" - DOGE has automatically rejected your petition.

The ruling was from a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and was an Obama appointee. The case was brought by 20 Democratic-controlled states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D).

The judge relied on the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...), which said that Obamacare’s individual mandate was a lawful use of Congress’s authority to enact taxes. And this judge rules that the H1B “fee” is a tax and not a penalty or whatever the administration is calling it. It notes that the defendants (the Trump administration) tried to label it as a “regulatory payment” and not a tax. And the ruling says that the administration’s own labels do not matter, and that the substance of what the fee is does matter, and the substance is that it is a tax.

PDF of this new H1B ruling: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.293...

I thought locking down H1Bs actually had bipartisan support?

How can you argue there aren't enough jobs, and support H1Bs to fill jobs?

I can see Alaska's case since encouraging people to move there very well may be a requirement, but surely there's somewhere between $0 and $100k that would convince someone to move there.

You’re putting words in people’s mouths. The fact that people oppose this solution doesn’t mean they disagree with the problem. We oppose it because it’s stupid; it’s the first solution that a dim-witted eight-year-old would’ve come up with.

The program needs to be reformed so it only applies to people with skills that genuinely cannot be found domestically.

Given the difference in expected engineering salaries for many citizens/permanent residents and foreigners/temporary residents, $100,000 is not an effective way of making that happen.

If people that think like you had actually done something about it, then we wouldn’t be to this point. But at this point the only people taking action are trumps, and if that’s the only solution being offered, it will be taken. The conversation here is mild, get the room temp on this issue outside of lib tech circles and you’ll see

So after 4 years, or whenever this con man finally has the decency to keel over, is everyone who supported these performative non-solutions simply to "be heard" (or however else they frame their emotional release) going to own up to the fact that they've burnt all the political capital on the issues they care about? Or are they going to blame their predictable failures on "libuhruls" and go right back to whinging while waiting for the next con man who might pay them lip service?

If you genuine shortage is not worth some 33k a year, it's not a genuine shortage.

Misleading title, implies national but only for one state

No, the article has an Alaska focus because it's some Alaskan news agency, but I believe it's a nation-wide block. The judge in question is based in Massachusetts.

Side note, but I'm sort of surprised that this "level" of judge (I think there's almost 700 of them in the country) is able to block these orders. It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.

Recently the Supreme Court has curtailed these nationwide injuctions: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/supreme-court-sides-with-...

> It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.

No "executive order" of the type commonly thrown around these days, sure. It's quite easy for "700 people" to agree on settled law when those people are federal court judges. Where the law is not settled, the President should not be making up dictatorial "executive orders" that are intended to be applied with the force of settled law. Legal ambiguity bears a cost, and that cost should fall onto the government itself rather than people being illegally harmed.

With the political mandate for immigration reform, all of these things could have been straightforwardly accomplished through the appropriate avenue of Congress - in fact there already was a bipartisan immigration bill well on its way which was killed! The sensible way to see these brash unilateral executive dictats are for the purpose of creating a mere appearance of addressing the problems, while ultimately just setting the stage for deliberate failure.

There was a ruling in Boston also, reported separately.

> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September

https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/08/politics/federal-judge-vo...

States don't regulate immigration.

This is great news for healthcare, academia, and engineering subdisciplines that don't have the margins to support a $100K per application fee.

That said, Trump's announcement has done lasting damage to tech hiring in the US because it's set a price floor for opening a GCC (Global Capacity Center), which subsidizes in the CEE (Central and Eastern EU States), Israel, and India can outcompete most of the US excluding the Bay and NYC where the preexisting ecosystem's network effect negates it's impact.

So your argument is we have to give American jobs to foreigners here in America or they’ll take them overseas? Pardon me if I’m not convinced

It's awful news for all of these, it vacates any attempts to force these industries to make themselves attractive for Americans.

What's a GCC/CEE?

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