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Comment by culopatin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

Boomer zoning laws do affect housing supply by reducing supply.

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.

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.

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.

Hardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.

so you want to leave rural children without teachers?

I think the commenter is volunteering to go themselves.

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

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

That sounds sort of racist, actually.

It is not racist, but it is true. The Education major is one of the bottom majors, Americans with the lowest grades and lowest SAT scores go on to become public school teachers. and it is well known information among Americans themselves.

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.

while foreigners on H1B are top percentile in academic performance and scoring and generally H1B attract top 1% talent from the global talent pool, especially given there are only like 60k visas issued per year.

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

Do SAT scores measure anything about pedagogic aptitude? I expect that at best, you get some form of correlation (in which direction?).

For teachers, other things matter more than reasoning skills or subject matter knowledge, especially in rural or otherwise challenging communities.

It shows revealed preference: all smart people decide to work anywhere but education and public schools are scraping the barrel for talent.

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...

Americans are every race. How could it be racist?

"H1B teachers are simply better"

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.

I have provided data below. US teachers have an extremely low bar

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.

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.

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