Comment by jorgen123
10 days ago
For those not reading the linked article, it was not about tech (although valid discussions here). I had not expected this (this is about rural Alaska):
> “In some rural districts, visa teachers make up 50% to nearly 80% of the teaching staff. School districts already invest $6,000 to $12,000 per teacher to recruit and sponsor educators through the H-1B visa process. Adding a $100,000 federal visa fee has made it financially impossible for many districts to continue hiring the teachers their students depend on.
There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well.
No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
Is there an excess of teachers in Alaska?
I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that.
Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.
My sister was a schoolteacher in Alaska. They pay a premium, but it’s still not a life that most Americans are cut out for, including me. That means the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money. Or, we can hire foreign teachers who are qualified AND are happy to teach up there.
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There's as many teachers in Alaska as they're willing to pay for.
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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.
People can’t seem to separate the issue of exploitation of H1B by (mostly Indian) consultancy mills to lower wages and bypass normal immigration vs the legitimate value of specialized skilled visas. You can fix one without killing the other.
It’s plausible Education might be one of the industries that gets exploited as they have no caps in the lottery like other H1 visas categories such as tech or doctors. But I don’t know enough about education visas personally.
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> there was no qualified American applicants
I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.
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> there was no qualified American applicants.
But are there qualified Americans who could easily switch to that job for one reason or another? Is the issue a lack of qualified professionals or is it a lack of interest by qualified professionals in the listed position?
It's very easy to receive no applications from qualified professionals that do in fact exist by simply not offering to pay them enough (among many other things). That shouldn't mean you get to undercut the domestic labor market; rather you should be forced to rethink the business plan.
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What salary range were you offering ?
Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty.
What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?
From what little I gather from online job listings, most foreign labor dependent positions are trying to pay 90K for a masters degree, maybe 120-140K Bay Area. Additionally, many of these job listings want extremely specific degrees or certifications that frankly are of little interest to US citizens - but F1 students will take any masters program despite the program having little salary benefit - the degree is a requirement for the visa.
I have a hard time believing you can’t find a US civil engineer who could learn the subject matter right out of college. Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.
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"We were unable to attract highly experienced data analysts, and we REFUSE to ever train anyone for any role, so we should be allowed to use scab labor to undercut American wages"
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Were you actually involved in the hiring? What is qualified? College degree and $30/hr?
I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me
Does your wife's consultancy business have a growing number of clients to handle? It might also be an issue of distribution.
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We need to incentivize more kids to get pavement design degrees to increase the supply
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Capitalism has an answer for that ... it's called "higher salary."
Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.
Pay more.
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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.
I think a lot of people don't understand how different it is to live in rural communities in general, and then to your point, how much more extreme rural Alaska is than "regular" rural areas.
I live in rural California. During the pandemic, a lot of people moved here and didn't last six months before leaving (I can relate, there's a lot I miss about living in SF!). There are so many services people expect, and they expect them to be prompt. We have the opposite of economies of scale in our small town. We have zero options for meal delivery. The nearest full size grocery is a 20-30 minute drive. Costco and Trader Joe's are a 90 minute drive. There are so few auto mechanics around that many of us drive 90 minutes for car service if we don't do it ourselves. Power outages often last 3-10 days. Large snow storms (4+ feet) typically make our roads impassable for 3-7 days. When the power goes out, internet follows 90 minutes later. There's no cell coverage inside or out, even when the power is on.
All of that is worse in almost all of Alaska. My brother worked on Alaska's North Slope for a few years - if you've ever seen the TV show Ice Road Truckers, that was his job. They'd fly him up north for a 1-2 week long shift, then fly him back to the little town he lived in for a week-long break. You have to worry about crazy things like hoping the summer doesn't get too warm, because roads will melt and collapse into what was previously permafrost. Uh oh, someone left a loading bay door in the warehouse open and now there's a polar bear in there breaking expensive stuff. Then you go home and can't go inside because a moose decided to go to sleep right in front of your door - better drive 50 miles and fuel up because you might be sleeping in your vehicle tonight and you don't want to freeze to death if your fuel runs out. These are all things my brother experienced. The pay was great, but he finally gave up and moved to Anchorage to drive a truck locally there.
But evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.
Rural Alaska... Just about the most inhospitable climate in the US, remote, and with a very high cost of living. Teachers can find work just about anywhere, they have little incentive to stay in Alaska.
The solution for this is simple - pay them more. There are plenty of recently graduated teachers who would work in Alaska for a few years if it paid off their student loans or let them save up a down payment on a house.
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Hardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.
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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
Not refuting your point but...
Most people who work in tech are not eligible for O1 or EB-1. F1 is a student visa, J1 requires you to go back after finishing your stuff. L1 can actually work but needs to be converted to either H1b, O1 or EB1 at some point soonish.
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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.
My gf makes about $90k a year, tons of time off, at 35 years old in a California public school. If she wasn't a teacher, she admits she'd probably be a cop or 911 dispatcher, because government gigs are what her entire extended family recommends. She has trouble adding 50 cents to 75 cents, but luckily she only teaches English and social studies to middle schoolers.
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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.
Even anchorage is pretty bad
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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.
And long hours!
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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