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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find your reference to "third worlders" a bit offensive and racist. "First worlders" (whatever that means for you) also do apply for H1B visas, just FYI.
If you imply that teachers on visa are somehow inferior or worse then citizen teachers (non-existent btw since noone is volunteering for Alaska gig), you are either being terribly misinformed or just bigoted.
With foreign accents its often hard to understand what's being said, and harder when there's a whole class and the student doesnt want to be disruptive.
You are being bigoted or ignorant again. There is a whole meme of people with Indian accents, explaining things on YouTube, and Americans genuinely appreciating their lessons because American teachers with perfect English like yours have failed to explain the subject properly
I find it harder to learn if I have to decipher the words not the content. This is true for lots of different accents. This is a common experience for those not overindexing on ethnonarcissism.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 courses 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.
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
And it's not just education - nurses, doctors, and plenty of engineers in the Energy and Construction sector were 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 leadership 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.
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
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?
>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).
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.
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
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.
That’s just an Executive Order. Executive Orders are instructions to the executive branch, not the country itself (obviously, the president doesn’t have that ability). Congress hasn’t passed a law establishing an official language in the US.
> 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 Indian workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, so if you are seeing Indians where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a deeper look at your employer's hiring practices.
>Rigorous examinations for English fluency and for competency in their alleged field of expertise would be a good start.
I have a good friend who came in as H1B and is now a citizen. I have also worked with many H1Bs who were absolutely terrible and definitely shouldn't be in the country. What I've noticed is that the key difference seems to be which country you are from. He is from a first world country with education standards. The ones who were no good came from the third world where fake diplomas are for sale cheap. It won't matter what qualifications we screen for if the third world happily prints up those fake qualifications for a small fee. I was sent so many candidates to interview who knew absolutely nothing, but they shamelessly put the proper keywords on their resume.
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....
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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"
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?
> 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..
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.
"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)."
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:
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.
They raise the cost of housing and suppress wages. The people who benefit from immigration are the billionaire class.
Sundar Pichai is a terrible example, he presided over the enshittification of Google and led the company basically nowhere. Satya Nadella is a similar story for Microsoft. The real reason Google is turning around on AI is because the founders quietly returned and have been leading the charge internally to save Google.
>the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere.
1/2 of Google's founders were Americans born in the US and the search industry already existed before Google was founded. I don't think there's a real argument that the search industry would have been founded anywhere else other than in the US. There's virtually no chance that had Sergei Brin's family stayed in Moscow, that Google would have been founded in Moscow and all of Google's jobs would today somehow exist in Russia. Same goes for Nvidia and all of these other companies. Silicon Valley was already a booming hub which had invented almost all of the foundational tech that today's computing industry was built on. It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.
When the Jamestown colony was established the amerindian population was greatly reduced due to disease that swept through <5 years before. The colonists found many empty villages.
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 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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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, opens new tab 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's as many teachers in Alaska as they're willing to pay for.
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.
Hardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.
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.
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.
so you want to leave rural children without teachers?
I think the commenter is volunteering to go themselves.
Worse, I want to eat babies!
Seriously though, manning schools by foreigners is a terrible idea, as is paying rural teachers so little that only third worlders are tempted.
I find your reference to "third worlders" a bit offensive and racist. "First worlders" (whatever that means for you) also do apply for H1B visas, just FYI.
If you imply that teachers on visa are somehow inferior or worse then citizen teachers (non-existent btw since noone is volunteering for Alaska gig), you are either being terribly misinformed or just bigoted.
With foreign accents its often hard to understand what's being said, and harder when there's a whole class and the student doesnt want to be disruptive.
You are being bigoted or ignorant again. There is a whole meme of people with Indian accents, explaining things on YouTube, and Americans genuinely appreciating their lessons because American teachers with perfect English like yours have failed to explain the subject properly
Again? I'm not the parent commentor.
I find it harder to learn if I have to decipher the words not the content. This is true for lots of different accents. This is a common experience for those not overindexing on ethnonarcissism.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Teachers are paid less than they should be and and must complete specific undergraduate and graduate courses 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.
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
And it's not just education - nurses, doctors, and plenty of engineers in the Energy and Construction sector were 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 leadership 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
Which is sadly very ironic.
There must be a better way to prevent the consulting firms from abusing this program
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?
>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?
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
But Visa applications need to prove English proficiency already. So it's somehow neither here nor there.
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.
Do you assume all EOs are illegal, or only the ones you disagree with?
Last I checked they run the casinos in English.
This one actually certainly is, it just hasn't shown up in court because no one's dumb enough to enforce it.
The Constitutional Convention discussed a national language at length in 1789, and adamantly didn't include a language requirement on purpose.
> 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.
>The US has no official language
Oh but it does. And it's English,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/06/2025-03...
That’s just an Executive Order. Executive Orders are instructions to the executive branch, not the country itself (obviously, the president doesn’t have that ability). Congress hasn’t passed a law establishing an official language in the US.
I dont think an EO can do that, so at most just executive agencies. Meaning the 2 other branches can ignore it.
I don't believe Trump's wacko EOs are binding law. Like, the Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico. The DoD is still the DoD.
No reason to give the fascist LARPers the respect. Just don't give the poor clerk forced to regurgitate the junk a hard time.
The US has an official language, and there are now language tests for some occupations
The executive branch has been instructed to act like we have an official language, but Congress hasn’t passed any law on the matter.
> 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 Indian workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, so if you are seeing Indians where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a deeper look at your employer's hiring practices.
Any legal barrier will just be cheated around.
>Rigorous examinations for English fluency and for competency in their alleged field of expertise would be a good start.
I have a good friend who came in as H1B and is now a citizen. I have also worked with many H1Bs who were absolutely terrible and definitely shouldn't be in the country. What I've noticed is that the key difference seems to be which country you are from. He is from a first world country with education standards. The ones who were no good came from the third world where fake diplomas are for sale cheap. It won't matter what qualifications we screen for if the third world happily prints up those fake qualifications for a small fee. I was sent so many candidates to interview who knew absolutely nothing, but they shamelessly put the proper keywords on their resume.
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....
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
There’s nothing remotely sensible about what Canada has done to allow Indian ethnic cartels to take over their job market
Why can’t Americans do these jobs?
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.
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"
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?
> 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..
Because they were laid off?
We can, that's not the purpose of this.
Maybe there aren't a ton of people in Alaska?
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.
> 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...
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.
They raise the cost of housing and suppress wages. The people who benefit from immigration are the billionaire class.
Sundar Pichai is a terrible example, he presided over the enshittification of Google and led the company basically nowhere. Satya Nadella is a similar story for Microsoft. The real reason Google is turning around on AI is because the founders quietly returned and have been leading the charge internally to save Google.
>the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere.
1/2 of Google's founders were Americans born in the US and the search industry already existed before Google was founded. I don't think there's a real argument that the search industry would have been founded anywhere else other than in the US. There's virtually no chance that had Sergei Brin's family stayed in Moscow, that Google would have been founded in Moscow and all of Google's jobs would today somehow exist in Russia. Same goes for Nvidia and all of these other companies. Silicon Valley was already a booming hub which had invented almost all of the foundational tech that today's computing industry was built on. It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.
“It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.”
The xenophobic ignorance of this sentence is breathtaking. America, of all places, is a nation built precisely by immigrants.
Settlers not immigrants. Immigrants come to a country and people that already exist. Settlers build anew.
Historically then, unless you are a Native American, you are an immigrant.
Perhaps it’s time for to GTFO? Is that the message?
Hacker News really resembles a MAGA rally at times
When the Jamestown colony was established the amerindian population was greatly reduced due to disease that swept through <5 years before. The colonists found many empty villages.
Refugees is maybe more accurate when it comes to country. We sprouted out of the social scene that was displaced by the English Civil War.
And the wars of religion generally. Eg, the Dutch in Pennsylvania and hugenots.
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 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
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.
>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.
> 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.
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...
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, opens new tab 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.
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.
...for the given price.
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.
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
What's a GCC/CEE?
It's awful news for all of these, it vacates any attempts to force these industries to make themselves attractive for Americans.
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 you genuine shortage is not worth some 33k a year, it's not a genuine shortage.
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