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.
No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
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.
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.
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.
China has already mostly made emigration illegal. The rest of the world will follow.
Genuinely news to me. Do you have any sources?
But here's one source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/02/18/china-right-leave-countr...
Other countries don't let you in without a passport. Even in the absence of a Chinese law, an airline would deny you boarding if you didn't have a passport.
In any case Houkou doesn’t prevent a person from leaving the country. A passport does, but this is the same in all countries.
> You see, it was always illegal to go outside of the country without Xi's approval and those approvals have mostly stopped coming.
There are hundreds of millions of trips out of China every year. A good number of them to the US for work. That fact is hard to square with what you’re saying.
There's an old Soviet joke: it's allowed! It's just that you haven't submitted your request, in triplicate, in our office in Siberia, open from 24:00 to 24:01 on Februari 30th every year! But it's allowed, with the proper permission. Just go get it!
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.
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.
Iran and Afghanistan are almost as laughable. When I was in Syria I met an Iranian guy with one eye that travelled through the Kurdish mountains into Iraq and then Syria. Iran doesn't even control the mountain passes out of the country, they're literally controlled by Kurdish rebels who have very little concept of immigration controls other than pay me a dollar.
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.
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.
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?
It is also possible we will simply not teach these children (or build infrastructure, grow labor intensive crop, ect).
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).
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.
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.
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.
The alternative isn't that rural communities get doctors born in the US, it's that they get no doctors.
(But I don't know how it really works, maybe it was residency only?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Come on man be real right now
I may have also misread the degree requirement as being higher than it was, but I think my point (prior to the edit) stands- for the posted requirements, the offered salary is low compared to other available jobs.
It's a middle of the pack/low salary offer in FAANG but the vast minority of developers here work at a company like that. It's hard to remember that sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
not having H1B foreigners like Elon Musk or Satya Nadella create/grow companies that employed tens of thousands Americans and created trillions of value for investors.
Remember it was White American Steven Ballmer who almost ruined Microsoft (he took MSFT at $620 bln and left at $280 bln valuation), and it took a foreigner like Satya to bring it to $4 trillion.
not having foreigners who could discover Attention mechanism or Transformer based models that led to AI boom.
US would literally be indistiguishable from Europe's lackluster development and growth, would you want US look more like EU ?
All of the wignats who complain and bitch about immigration completely forget or take for granted all the tech progress made in the US by foreign workers, and all the non-tech jobs that get created thanks to tech work being done by foreigners.
Just visit any graduate program in the top tier US university lab, visit any leading scientific conference, or lookup nationalities of top cited research papers, and imagine USA without all those talented people with foreign sounding last names.
That will be proper comparison
that American capitalists are stupid enough to overpay underskilled Americans, the moment H1Bs are banned or limited, instead of opening satellite offices outside US
I've seen those kind of proposals as ballot measures that get voted down.
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.
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.
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)
I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me
I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.
(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.
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.
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.
Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.
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.
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.
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
That sounds sort of racist, actually.
https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/1954326425072546055/pho...
https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...
The average SAT for Education majors: 1023
It’s ranked 24th, behind Communications (19th), Library Science (13th), and English (11th). The top major: Math.
People who look at the stats objectively should be the first ones to advocate for more H1B teachers, if that meant children would get dramatically better education
For teachers, other things matter more than reasoning skills or subject matter knowledge, especially in rural or otherwise challenging communities.
Results you can see with your own eyes. USA had to significantly dumb down SAT, switch to dumbed down “Common Core” curriculum, ditch gifted&talented programs across the board, ditch SAT requirements for college and introduce remedial math at Harvard!!! The creme de la creme of US Education system.
If American teachers were any good, private schools would not be able to charge more than Ivy League tuition for very simple secondary education
This is all consequence of what kind of people decide to become Teachers, and what kind of people decide to become Wall St Traders
In the end this shows up in massive dependence on Foreign talent via H1B visas. US is importing engineers precisely because Americans did not have good STEM teachers who could teach them math and logic in middle school.
https://abcnews.com/amp/GMA/Living/us-students-reading-math-...
https://www.realcleareducation.com/2025/03/20/harvard_launch...
Considering the overwhelming demographics of H1B visas are massively racially different from the US, this is Racism, pure and simple.
This is the undercurrent of H1B immigration: people who harbor racism against the US's predominate demographic doing anything they can to scam the system and enrich themselves no matter the cost to others.
It seems to me things would be better if they were classified as different visa categories.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
Immigration affects housing demand by increasing demand. These are both effects. They are both bad.
The solution options are: 1. Destroy zoning and keep immigration the same and go full Favela mode 2. 0 out immigration and keep having nice, but too expensive houses 3. address both problems and absolutely crater housing prices, thus giving the youth a place to grow and have families.
We do need to address both sides of the issue. Don't forget that there is both Supply, and Demand for any economic item.
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.
The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?
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.
Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.