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 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.
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.
Rural Alaska is a special kind of rural that most people won't take to. Communities off the road where you fly in on a small plane, take a river boat, or snow machine in the winter to get there. Most are tribal and insular. Getting anyone to move there is a big ask. For a H1B teacher it is a foot in the door.
Remind me who is at the forefront of cutting funding to government programs.
The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?
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.
And it's not just education - nurses, doctors, and plenty of engineers in the Energy, Mining, and Construction sector are also brought on H1Bs to Alaska.
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> Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects
Yes.
I have a good buddy of mine who is senior management at an ANRC and they will pay 6 figure salaries to non-natives irrespective of citizenship in a number of cases.
Heck, even the starting salary for unskilled federal roles like TSA agents at Utquiatvik was $70K last I was there versus $30-40k in the rest of the mainland.
Much of Alaska is literal villages that are disconnected from the outside world aside from the occasional bush plane, and amenities are nonexistent. You are talking about towns and villages where most of the residents are entirely depending on UBI (Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) and subsidence hunting/farming.
As such, it's not enticing.
Also, a number of Alaska Natives prefer hiring Thai and Filipino immigrants over Americans (who statistically tend to be White, Black, or Hispanic) because if you're hiring outsiders you may as well hire outsiders who look like you and are viewed as more culturally aligned.
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
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
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 degrees as well as additional ongoing certifications. They are, unfortunately, not well respected by many groups. And right-wing folks have been making noise about augmenting and replacing teachers with AI. I have multiple friends who have left teaching due to lack of respect and support from student parents. I still have two teachers in my family.
I’m going to call this one as likely to be overturned on appeal. The Immigration and Naturalization Act provides:
“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens
into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he
may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the
entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose
on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” (INA Section 212(f).)
Congress specifically gave the President the power to make findings and impose conditions, and the APA doesn’t apply to the President. The district court side-steps this by saying that the fee is a tax and 212(f) doesn’t delegate taxing power to the President. But that’s a separation of powers problem, not an APA problem. That is, if the fee was actually a tax, it wouldn’t be permissible even if the President had explained it properly as required by the APA. The executive can’t levy a tax by going through the procedural niceties of the APA. The APA angle is a red herring.
So the real issue is whether the fee is a “tax” that only Congress can levy. I think it’s a fee, not a tax. The Supreme Court has distinguished between user fees and taxes as follows: “We there described ‘fees’ as ‘bestow[ing]’ a reciprocal ‘benefit on the [payor], not shared by other members of society.’ NCTA, 415 U. S., at 341. By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public. Id., at 343.’” (FCC v. Consumers’ Research: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/606/24-354/)
The H1b fee falls squarely within what the Supreme Court has called “fees.” The benefit of being able to bring over a particular foreign worker inures directly to the employer filing the visa petition, not the public at large.
I'm in agreement with your position but I'm confused by the SCOTUS criteria for distinguishing taxes and fees. I follow the reasoning that you receive a tangible benefit as an individual for payment of a fee. That much makes sense to me. However what puzzles me is "By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public." Do not fees also benefit the wider public to the extent that they fund the government? I'm failing to see any difference in that regard.
Whether it is a fee or tax is less about whether it funds the government and more about whether when you pay the amount you get some benefit that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pay (above and beyond compliance with tax law). For example a fishing licence is a fee while a flood levy is a tax.
When you pay income tax (for example), your personal benefit from that tax is no different from my benefit from your income tax. But if you pay a passport fee (for example), you receive a specific benefit that I do not.
Very sharp reading. My quotation presents the two definitions as freestanding. But as you observe, the definition of “tax” isn’t freestanding. There’s additional context, which comes from the fact that this issue only comes up when you’ve got a payment that purports to be for some government benefit. If the government imposes a payment on you in return for nothing then that’s clearly a tax. So, for example, the ACA penalty on uninsured people was a tax.
By contrast, if the government is purporting to charge you a fee in return for some benefit, that can still be a tax when the benefit that you’re getting really is a benefit to the public at large. So you’re comparing the benefit of what you’re supposedly paying for to the benefit to the public at large for operating the government. An example would be the case that alleged that PACER fees for operating the electronic court filing system were impermissible taxes. There, what you’re paying for is putatively access to a specific document. But the cost is ($0.10 per page) is way out of line with how electronic access to documents is normally valued. What you’re really paying for is the existence of the electronic filing system itself, which is something that inures to the benefit of the public at large.
Fees don’t have to be limited to the cost of the specific transaction. Lots of agencies, not to mention the courts themselves, charge fees that go towards the operation of the agency and don’t just defray the specific costs of a single transaction.
In the NCTA case cited above, the Supreme Court upheld a law that authorized the FCC to impose “fees” on cable licensees that took into account the value of the license to the provider. So a fee need not be limited to the cost for an agency to process a license. A charge can be based on the value of the authorization or license provided and still qualify as a fee not a tax. FCC spectrum auctions are another example. The FCC charges billions of dollars for 4G/5G spectrum licenses. That’s based on value of the license to the licensees, not the cost of processing the licenses. Here, the $100k fee easily can be seen as reflecting the value to the employer of being able to hire the foreign worker.
Do they? Honest question. Is there a law that says fees must be in some sense justified?
> Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.
This seems like a nonsense response to GP. They gave a definition of fee vs tax that is based on a meaningful distinction and not what it happens to be called.
There is actually a sensible way to do recruit foreign workers to fill jobs that locals for some reason can't fill, and it's just a few miles up north...
Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is not limited by annual caps or lotteries. You just apply (as a company) by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable. I've hired many people through this program to fill a variety of roles over the years, and all of them eventually became citizens too. Once you're on Canadian soil as a TFW, moving toward permanent residency is not very difficult if you're a skilled worker with enough "points" (based on education, etc.).
Some argue (perhaps correctly) that the TFWP suppresses Canadian wages and productivity growth by flooding the labour market with cheap staff from poor countries. And there is likely some truth to that. But when I hear how many hoops my US colleagues have to jump through with lawyers and such to bring skilled employees in, it boggles my mind. If the Americans were to implement a more modern temporary foreign worker program similar to what Canada has, you'd have to imagine the US economy would boom like it never has.
Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a horrible program that has been flagrantly abused for years to the detriment of Canadians. There's record high youth unemployment yet every Tim Hortons is filled with Indians.
Yes, you'll be hard pressed to find any Canadians at any fast food restaurants now. It's a common scam to pay a Tim Hortons owner 20-30k and he'll make you a manager at the franchise, then he'll give you a shared room where you pay monthly to live there. Then you work for free. The UN literaly wrote how Canada has created a neo-slavery system.
I'm not sure whether you're aware of how racist this comment may sound to many readers here on HN, but you're definitely echoing the sentiment of many Canadians who sense that "foreigners" are taking away their jobs - a concept that has been leveraged by conservative politicians to stoke distaste for the current government. There is indeed a lack of youth employment in Canada, and the TFWP may be somewhat to blame for that. But labelling it as a problem with regard to a single group of immigrants strikes me as unhelpful.
> 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.
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?
No, that's a silly test. If I want to bring in a world renown battery expert from China, it's ridiculous to also add on "and you must speak English well". English fluency has absolutely nothing to do with expertise.
What we actually need is a higher minimum salary for H1B employees. Right now it's something like 50k per year, which is insanely low for a "hard to find expert" it should be more like $300k per year. H1B employees should be some of the best paid employees in a company. Raise that minimum salary and you'll overnight fix almost all complaints with the H1B program. Except for from the business owners who are abusing the system to get cheap labor.
Hah. And you think a Govt agency will be able to do a rigorous enough examination to eliminate people who don't know that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order?
Reminds me of a friend whose job application got rejected by some Govt agency in Canada due to "experience mismatch." Job required "Software Programmer" experience but he was a "Software Engineer" instead.
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....
> 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
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?
1. Set a monthly quota (for argument's sake, 5000 a month).
2. Each month the government holds an auction, and businesses that believe they need to bring in foreign labour can bid for however many visas they want.
3. The highest bidding companies get the visas.
This way the government can control how many foreign workers come in to the country each year, and the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.
It also means that the limited number of available H1B visas are put towards their highest value use. The company that wants to bring in a highly skilled foreign worker that's worth $500,000 in additional profit to them will be willing to bid up to $499,999 for their visa. The company that wants to bring in another Tim Hortons worker won't be able to outbid them.
Because the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.
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....
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.
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).
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)."
Do you want to move to Alaska, and rural Alaska at that (although even “cities” in Alaska are rural by most standards)? You get to be thousands of miles from your existing community, you won’t have a grocery store nearby, there may even be no way to get into or out of your village except by plane. Maybe in the winter you’ll be totally snowed in for weeks at a time.
You could offer me twice what I make as a software engineer and I wouldn’t take the job.
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
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 in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas, which tech companies in particular rely heavily on to bring on foreign workers.
H1B is a terrible and maximally abused program in its current form. Adding a $100k fee (which I expect eventually to be found to be not-a-tax and therefore legal) is not a fix, it is merely a revenue stream.
It needs a couple things:
1. Break current gamification of lottery winners. Probably by requiring a greater diversity in country-of-origin of H1B visas granted annually. Probably involves some kind of % or per country cap.
2. Better wage protection for US workers in the minimum salary requirements. H1B is ostensibly to address skills gaps but is actually an sub-competitive wage scheme.
People talk about H1B visas solving certain problems but inevitably the problems it solves is keeping wages low. For instance, imagine if rural teachers were paid like tech workers or crab fishermen. The draw would pull from across the country. Like tech workers and crab fishermen.
- Say that no more than 5% of a company, rounded up, can be H-1b. Ex If you have 1-20 employees, only 1 can be an h-1b. Adjust the % based on how well the policy works.
- give companies less power over h-1b holders. Make it last six months or a year after the date they get fired, so they are not so tied down. Don’t make it indentured servitude.
The ruling was from a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and was an Obama appointee. The case was brought by 20 Democratic-controlled states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D).
The judge relied on the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...), which said that Obamacare’s individual mandate was a lawful use of Congress’s authority to enact taxes. And this judge rules that the H1B “fee” is a tax and not a penalty or whatever the administration is calling it. It notes that the defendants (the Trump administration) tried to label it as a “regulatory payment” and not a tax. And the ruling says that the administration’s own labels do not matter, and that the substance of what the fee is does matter, and the substance is that it is a tax.
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
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.
> It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.
No "executive order" of the type commonly thrown around these days, sure. It's quite easy for "700 people" to agree on settled law when those people are federal court judges. Where the law is not settled, the President should not be making up dictatorial "executive orders" that are intended to be applied with the force of settled law. Legal ambiguity bears a cost, and that cost should fall onto the government itself rather than people being illegally harmed.
With the political mandate for immigration reform, all of these things could have been straightforwardly accomplished through the appropriate avenue of Congress - in fact there already was a bipartisan immigration bill well on its way which was killed! The sensible way to see these brash unilateral executive dictats are for the purpose of creating a mere appearance of addressing the problems, while ultimately just setting the stage for deliberate failure.
There was a ruling in Boston also, reported separately.
> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September
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.
For those not reading the linked article, it was not about tech (although valid discussions here). I had not expected this (this is about rural Alaska):
> “In some rural districts, visa teachers make up 50% to nearly 80% of the teaching staff. School districts already invest $6,000 to $12,000 per teacher to recruit and sponsor educators through the H-1B visa process. Adding a $100,000 federal visa fee has made it financially impossible for many districts to continue hiring the teachers their students depend on.
There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well.
No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
Is there an excess of teachers in Alaska?
I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that.
Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.
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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.
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Rural Alaska is a special kind of rural that most people won't take to. Communities off the road where you fly in on a small plane, take a river boat, or snow machine in the winter to get there. Most are tribal and insular. Getting anyone to move there is a big ask. For a H1B teacher it is a foot in the door.
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But evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.
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Remind me who is at the forefront of cutting funding to government programs.
The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?
It’s not the job, it’s the location.
There is a shortage of most careers that require and college degree in rural areas.
Also, rural areas don’t have the tax base to out pay urban areas.
This is about the stagnation and lack of vitality in rural towns in general.
Er, there is an excess of teachers because they are paid so poorly. Teaching (like nursing) is absolutely a labor of love and so they are heavily undervalued and underpaid in this country.
> No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.
And it's not just education - nurses, doctors, and plenty of engineers in the Energy, Mining, and Construction sector are also brought on H1Bs to Alaska.
Edit: can't reply
> Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects
Yes.
I have a good buddy of mine who is senior management at an ANRC and they will pay 6 figure salaries to non-natives irrespective of citizenship in a number of cases.
Heck, even the starting salary for unskilled federal roles like TSA agents at Utquiatvik was $70K last I was there versus $30-40k in the rest of the mainland.
Much of Alaska is literal villages that are disconnected from the outside world aside from the occasional bush plane, and amenities are nonexistent. You are talking about towns and villages where most of the residents are entirely depending on UBI (Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) and subsidence hunting/farming.
As such, it's not enticing.
Also, a number of Alaska Natives prefer hiring Thai and Filipino immigrants over Americans (who statistically tend to be White, Black, or Hispanic) because if you're hiring outsiders you may as well hire outsiders who look like you and are viewed as more culturally aligned.
Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects?
Yeah, most of us think of tech, but the program affects doctors, nurses and teachers for rural America.
This was the most infuriating part.
Big Tech has multiple carveouts to bring tech labor using F1/J1/L1/O1/EB-1 and various other visas, and they wouldn't even feel the 100k fee given their budgets.
While non-tech sectors were the ones most affected
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Which is sadly very ironic.
Isn't the entire point of this order to prevent filling low-paying jobs with cheap foreign labor, in order to increase demand for domestic labor? "Rural district schoolteacher" sounds like exactly the kind of job where the H1B program has very low public support
You have been terribly misled.
Not from USA, is there shortage of teachers in USA? Or government pays too little to have local teachers consider such jobs? Seems like a broken system
> is there shortage of teachers in USA?
No, there is a steady stream of teachers being fed into the maw of public education. The pay is low and job security is terrible until you get tenure. My wife was a teacher; I have heard horror stories.
You get paid based on a combination of how much money you earn your employer and how easy you are to replace. Schools get paid by taxes, and there are a ton of them produced every year. So, the pay is abysmal.
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The "Alaska" bit is very important. Very remote, very cold. Everything is very expensive because almost all of it has to be shipped in by air.
Yes, the US teacher pay is generally crap and we're short on teachers everywhere, but Alaska is a rather unique situation.
It's 16% of the US's land area, but only 0.2% of the population.
Rural Alaska is by and large very very remote. Often small plane is the only practical access and then only in favorable weather.
Recruiting teachers to remote villages with extreme weather is hard and if you are at US university training to be a teacher you will probably have other options that are more attractive as a young person.
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Teacher pay is low, but it also requires certification and a degree. And in exchange it will be relatively stressful and lacking in prestige.
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Little bit of both. Pay varies drastically from state to state, even taking cost of living into account. By the time you pay for a degree and a credential the ROI isn't great. Jobs in better paying areas exist too but are understandably more competitive
Teachers are paid less than they should be and and must complete specific undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as additional ongoing certifications. They are, unfortunately, not well respected by many groups. And right-wing folks have been making noise about augmenting and replacing teachers with AI. I have multiple friends who have left teaching due to lack of respect and support from student parents. I still have two teachers in my family.
Reminds me of the plot from North Exposure.
*Northern Exposure
I’m going to call this one as likely to be overturned on appeal. The Immigration and Naturalization Act provides:
“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” (INA Section 212(f).)
Congress specifically gave the President the power to make findings and impose conditions, and the APA doesn’t apply to the President. The district court side-steps this by saying that the fee is a tax and 212(f) doesn’t delegate taxing power to the President. But that’s a separation of powers problem, not an APA problem. That is, if the fee was actually a tax, it wouldn’t be permissible even if the President had explained it properly as required by the APA. The executive can’t levy a tax by going through the procedural niceties of the APA. The APA angle is a red herring.
So the real issue is whether the fee is a “tax” that only Congress can levy. I think it’s a fee, not a tax. The Supreme Court has distinguished between user fees and taxes as follows: “We there described ‘fees’ as ‘bestow[ing]’ a reciprocal ‘benefit on the [payor], not shared by other members of society.’ NCTA, 415 U. S., at 341. By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public. Id., at 343.’” (FCC v. Consumers’ Research: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/606/24-354/)
The H1b fee falls squarely within what the Supreme Court has called “fees.” The benefit of being able to bring over a particular foreign worker inures directly to the employer filing the visa petition, not the public at large.
I'm in agreement with your position but I'm confused by the SCOTUS criteria for distinguishing taxes and fees. I follow the reasoning that you receive a tangible benefit as an individual for payment of a fee. That much makes sense to me. However what puzzles me is "By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public." Do not fees also benefit the wider public to the extent that they fund the government? I'm failing to see any difference in that regard.
Whether it is a fee or tax is less about whether it funds the government and more about whether when you pay the amount you get some benefit that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pay (above and beyond compliance with tax law). For example a fishing licence is a fee while a flood levy is a tax.
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When you pay income tax (for example), your personal benefit from that tax is no different from my benefit from your income tax. But if you pay a passport fee (for example), you receive a specific benefit that I do not.
Very sharp reading. My quotation presents the two definitions as freestanding. But as you observe, the definition of “tax” isn’t freestanding. There’s additional context, which comes from the fact that this issue only comes up when you’ve got a payment that purports to be for some government benefit. If the government imposes a payment on you in return for nothing then that’s clearly a tax. So, for example, the ACA penalty on uninsured people was a tax.
By contrast, if the government is purporting to charge you a fee in return for some benefit, that can still be a tax when the benefit that you’re getting really is a benefit to the public at large. So you’re comparing the benefit of what you’re supposedly paying for to the benefit to the public at large for operating the government. An example would be the case that alleged that PACER fees for operating the electronic court filing system were impermissible taxes. There, what you’re paying for is putatively access to a specific document. But the cost is ($0.10 per page) is way out of line with how electronic access to documents is normally valued. What you’re really paying for is the existence of the electronic filing system itself, which is something that inures to the benefit of the public at large.
I disagree. Fees have to be justified and USCIS is not spending $100,000 to process a H1B applicant. They are raising revenue. Which is taxation.
Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.
Fees don’t have to be limited to the cost of the specific transaction. Lots of agencies, not to mention the courts themselves, charge fees that go towards the operation of the agency and don’t just defray the specific costs of a single transaction.
In the NCTA case cited above, the Supreme Court upheld a law that authorized the FCC to impose “fees” on cable licensees that took into account the value of the license to the provider. So a fee need not be limited to the cost for an agency to process a license. A charge can be based on the value of the authorization or license provided and still qualify as a fee not a tax. FCC spectrum auctions are another example. The FCC charges billions of dollars for 4G/5G spectrum licenses. That’s based on value of the license to the licensees, not the cost of processing the licenses. Here, the $100k fee easily can be seen as reflecting the value to the employer of being able to hire the foreign worker.
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> Fees have to be justified
Do they? Honest question. Is there a law that says fees must be in some sense justified?
> Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.
This seems like a nonsense response to GP. They gave a definition of fee vs tax that is based on a meaningful distinction and not what it happens to be called.
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There is actually a sensible way to do recruit foreign workers to fill jobs that locals for some reason can't fill, and it's just a few miles up north...
Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is not limited by annual caps or lotteries. You just apply (as a company) by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable. I've hired many people through this program to fill a variety of roles over the years, and all of them eventually became citizens too. Once you're on Canadian soil as a TFW, moving toward permanent residency is not very difficult if you're a skilled worker with enough "points" (based on education, etc.).
Some argue (perhaps correctly) that the TFWP suppresses Canadian wages and productivity growth by flooding the labour market with cheap staff from poor countries. And there is likely some truth to that. But when I hear how many hoops my US colleagues have to jump through with lawyers and such to bring skilled employees in, it boggles my mind. If the Americans were to implement a more modern temporary foreign worker program similar to what Canada has, you'd have to imagine the US economy would boom like it never has.
Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a horrible program that has been flagrantly abused for years to the detriment of Canadians. There's record high youth unemployment yet every Tim Hortons is filled with Indians.
Yes, you'll be hard pressed to find any Canadians at any fast food restaurants now. It's a common scam to pay a Tim Hortons owner 20-30k and he'll make you a manager at the franchise, then he'll give you a shared room where you pay monthly to live there. Then you work for free. The UN literaly wrote how Canada has created a neo-slavery system.
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I'm not sure whether you're aware of how racist this comment may sound to many readers here on HN, but you're definitely echoing the sentiment of many Canadians who sense that "foreigners" are taking away their jobs - a concept that has been leveraged by conservative politicians to stoke distaste for the current government. There is indeed a lack of youth employment in Canada, and the TFWP may be somewhat to blame for that. But labelling it as a problem with regard to a single group of immigrants strikes me as unhelpful.
What's wrong with Indians? Why do so many people here want us to hate on Indians?
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Oh wont somebody please think of the Tim Hortons.
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There’s nothing remotely sensible about what Canada has done to allow Indian ethnic cartels to take over their job market
> by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable
This is anathema to tech H1B abusers, which is why they post these jobs in obscure print publications no one reads, to deliberately conceal their existence, while meeting the legal requirement.
Unfortunately for them, they cannot treat domestic workers as chattel, which is the inconvenient truth in most cases.
You're confusing H1B with PERM. H1B has no job posting requirements.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...
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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?
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No, that's a silly test. If I want to bring in a world renown battery expert from China, it's ridiculous to also add on "and you must speak English well". English fluency has absolutely nothing to do with expertise.
What we actually need is a higher minimum salary for H1B employees. Right now it's something like 50k per year, which is insanely low for a "hard to find expert" it should be more like $300k per year. H1B employees should be some of the best paid employees in a company. Raise that minimum salary and you'll overnight fix almost all complaints with the H1B program. Except for from the business owners who are abusing the system to get cheap labor.
Hah. And you think a Govt agency will be able to do a rigorous enough examination to eliminate people who don't know that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order?
Reminds me of a friend whose job application got rejected by some Govt agency in Canada due to "experience mismatch." Job required "Software Programmer" experience but he was a "Software Engineer" instead.
> could not understand that just because a method in C# is asynchronous does not mean it executes out of order.
Want to bet how many naturally born US citizens in your colleagues can answer the question in a technical interview?
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Many of the people I grew up with "barely speak intelligible English". Communication is important and the easiest way to fix that is to bring people from your linguistic group to be a coworker....
Any legal barrier will just be cheated around.
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> 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
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Two rules:
1. No subcontracting. Visa recipients must work directly for the visa sponsor.
2. No layoffs. Any company that does a mass layoff is banned from sponsoring new visas for 5 years.
There is no abuse. That's why tech companies recruit for software positions in the back pages of a gay mag in Salt Lake City and require resumes sent by postal mail.
Disqualify consulting firms from "hiring" H-1Bs. You should be employed directly by the business needing the skilled guest worker.
There are multiple [0], but the announcement of this policy helped overshadow the announcement of the Trump Gold Card at the exact same time [1].
[0] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
Only allow American firms to use H1-B. Most of the H1-B abuse is from the Indian 'WITCH' companies. Why foreign firms are allowed to hire foreign workers in the US is beyond me. For training / administration, there should be another visa type which does not confer family benefits and cannot progress to greencard or whatever.
BUT... at the end of the day, the solution must be passed by congress. Have we all forgotten about Congress since they stopped doing anything?
All of them have US subsidiaries and Cognizant is an US listed company.
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Why don't they just auction H1B visas?
1. Set a monthly quota (for argument's sake, 5000 a month).
2. Each month the government holds an auction, and businesses that believe they need to bring in foreign labour can bid for however many visas they want.
3. The highest bidding companies get the visas.
This way the government can control how many foreign workers come in to the country each year, and the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.
It also means that the limited number of available H1B visas are put towards their highest value use. The company that wants to bring in a highly skilled foreign worker that's worth $500,000 in additional profit to them will be willing to bid up to $499,999 for their visa. The company that wants to bring in another Tim Hortons worker won't be able to outbid them.
Because the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.
Why can’t Americans do these jobs?
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.
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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....
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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.
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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).
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> 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.
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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.
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> unwillingness to fund education.
"The United States spent $15,500 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 38 percent higher than the average of OECD countries3 reporting data ($11,300). The United States had the fifth highest expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level in 2019 after Luxembourg, Norway ($18,000), and Austria and the Republic of Korea ($15,900 each)."
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
Do you want to move to Alaska, and rural Alaska at that (although even “cities” in Alaska are rural by most standards)? You get to be thousands of miles from your existing community, you won’t have a grocery store nearby, there may even be no way to get into or out of your village except by plane. Maybe in the winter you’ll be totally snowed in for weeks at a time.
You could offer me twice what I make as a software engineer and I wouldn’t take the job.
Maybe there aren't a ton of people in Alaska?
Because they were laid off?
We can, that's not the purpose of this.
They arent capable.
Because in America, the boomers' retirement accounts are partially funded by insane college tuition (through insane college services and textbooks), so college has essentially become a guaranteed debt trap that gives you a lottery ticket to maybe be in the top 1%.
They 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
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The H1B visa is explicitly designed for high skill (high paying) jobs which companies have (supposedly) demonstrated they cannot find enough citizen workers.
There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.
You could also just have a more proactive government which punishes businesses for abusing the visa category.
"Immigrants taking good jobs" isn't an immigrant problem, it's a big-business problem
>There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.
The Trump admin already did that too:
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-pro...
It's more alarming that US doesn't have enough skilled teachers in the nation that we have to hire from overseas.
Education is an investment to the future generation and must not be overlooked.
That’s not even remotely the case. We just don’t have enough people willing to move to rural Alaska.
I'm sure the supply will go up if extra $$$ is paid.
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...for the given price.
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Heaven forbid we could pay better! Something something market signals... not like Alaska is hurting for money.
The gnashing of teeth and “you couldn’t pay me enough to live there” comments are EXACTLY why I like living up here.
Good. I’m totally fine with whiners self-selecting out of the state.
Also? I’ve worked in rural Alaska. It’s not nearly so bad as the people on here would say.
Worth mentioning that I’m also for no real restrictions on immigration either. Bring on the H1Bs up here, we could use the help.
Also a ruling in Boston:
https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is...
> BOSTON, June 8 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday struck down a $100,000 fee U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, concluding that it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized.
> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas, which tech companies in particular rely heavily on to bring on foreign workers.
H1B is a terrible and maximally abused program in its current form. Adding a $100k fee (which I expect eventually to be found to be not-a-tax and therefore legal) is not a fix, it is merely a revenue stream.
It needs a couple things:
1. Break current gamification of lottery winners. Probably by requiring a greater diversity in country-of-origin of H1B visas granted annually. Probably involves some kind of % or per country cap. 2. Better wage protection for US workers in the minimum salary requirements. H1B is ostensibly to address skills gaps but is actually an sub-competitive wage scheme.
People talk about H1B visas solving certain problems but inevitably the problems it solves is keeping wages low. For instance, imagine if rural teachers were paid like tech workers or crab fishermen. The draw would pull from across the country. Like tech workers and crab fishermen.
- Say that no more than 5% of a company, rounded up, can be H-1b. Ex If you have 1-20 employees, only 1 can be an h-1b. Adjust the % based on how well the policy works.
- give companies less power over h-1b holders. Make it last six months or a year after the date they get fired, so they are not so tied down. Don’t make it indentured servitude.
ctrl+f "diversity" - DOGE has automatically rejected your petition.
The ruling was from a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and was an Obama appointee. The case was brought by 20 Democratic-controlled states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D).
The judge relied on the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...), which said that Obamacare’s individual mandate was a lawful use of Congress’s authority to enact taxes. And this judge rules that the H1B “fee” is a tax and not a penalty or whatever the administration is calling it. It notes that the defendants (the Trump administration) tried to label it as a “regulatory payment” and not a tax. And the ruling says that the administration’s own labels do not matter, and that the substance of what the fee is does matter, and the substance is that it is a tax.
PDF of this new H1B ruling: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.293...
I thought locking down H1Bs actually had bipartisan support?
How can you argue there aren't enough jobs, and support H1Bs to fill jobs?
I can see Alaska's case since encouraging people to move there very well may be a requirement, but surely there's somewhere between $0 and $100k that would convince someone to move there.
You’re putting words in people’s mouths. The fact that people oppose this solution doesn’t mean they disagree with the problem. We oppose it because it’s stupid; it’s the first solution that a dim-witted eight-year-old would’ve come up with.
The program needs to be reformed so it only applies to people with skills that genuinely cannot be found domestically.
Given the difference in expected engineering salaries for many citizens/permanent residents and foreigners/temporary residents, $100,000 is not an effective way of making that happen.
If people that think like you had actually done something about it, then we wouldn’t be to this point. But at this point the only people taking action are trumps, and if that’s the only solution being offered, it will be taken. The conversation here is mild, get the room temp on this issue outside of lib tech circles and you’ll see
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If you genuine shortage is not worth some 33k a year, it's not a genuine shortage.
Misleading title, implies national but only for one state
No, the article has an Alaska focus because it's some Alaskan news agency, but I believe it's a nation-wide block. The judge in question is based in Massachusetts.
Side note, but I'm sort of surprised that this "level" of judge (I think there's almost 700 of them in the country) is able to block these orders. It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.
Recently the Supreme Court has curtailed these nationwide injuctions: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/supreme-court-sides-with-...
> It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.
No "executive order" of the type commonly thrown around these days, sure. It's quite easy for "700 people" to agree on settled law when those people are federal court judges. Where the law is not settled, the President should not be making up dictatorial "executive orders" that are intended to be applied with the force of settled law. Legal ambiguity bears a cost, and that cost should fall onto the government itself rather than people being illegally harmed.
With the political mandate for immigration reform, all of these things could have been straightforwardly accomplished through the appropriate avenue of Congress - in fact there already was a bipartisan immigration bill well on its way which was killed! The sensible way to see these brash unilateral executive dictats are for the purpose of creating a mere appearance of addressing the problems, while ultimately just setting the stage for deliberate failure.
There was a ruling in Boston also, reported separately.
> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September
https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/08/politics/federal-judge-vo...
States don't regulate immigration.
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This is great news for healthcare, academia, and engineering subdisciplines that don't have the margins to support a $100K per application fee.
That said, Trump's announcement has done lasting damage to tech hiring in the US because it's set a price floor for opening a GCC (Global Capacity Center), which subsidizes in the CEE (Central and Eastern EU States), Israel, and India can outcompete most of the US excluding the Bay and NYC where the preexisting ecosystem's network effect negates it's impact.
So your argument is we have to give American jobs to foreigners here in America or they’ll take them overseas? Pardon me if I’m not convinced
It's awful news for all of these, it vacates any attempts to force these industries to make themselves attractive for Americans.
What's a GCC/CEE?