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.
Alaska will already pay off loans for teachers that will teach in rural communities. My friend taught in Yakutat for 5 years to pay off loans before moving to a larger town. But Yakutat is well connected as far as rural towns go. They have jet service and a ferry in the summer. Not many takers to go live in a tribal town 200 miles up a river.
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.
People who critique H1B always seem to assume that people actually hiring for labor are much dumber than those bright commenters and haven't exhausted each and every other opportunity to find qualified people.
No, you are not being smarter than lawmakers who enacted H1B program, and then refused to dismantle it at every opportunity to do so. You are not smarter than employers who have to hire via H1B and pay tens of thousands dollars to immigration lawyers for stupid paperwork.
Most of the critique of H1B in this post is just bigoted, hateful, and uneducated rant
you said "smarter" in this comment when a more accurate term is "corrupt". Being unable to find a candidate for your given budget requires that you either increase the budgeted salary or decrease the requirements, and train on the job. If you cannot do either of these, your company MUST fail. It is inhumane to demolish the US working class by importing foreign scab labor. Too much labor supply (aka immigration) decreases fair market value for wages. That alone is more than enough justification for ending all immigration of any significant amount.
Handwaving away significant issues as "bigotry, etc" is unhelpful to the discussion. We haven't even covered the impact on housing supply, as illustrated by Canada's insane valuations.
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.
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.
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.
Alaska will already pay off loans for teachers that will teach in rural communities. My friend taught in Yakutat for 5 years to pay off loans before moving to a larger town. But Yakutat is well connected as far as rural towns go. They have jet service and a ferry in the summer. Not many takers to go live in a tribal town 200 miles up a river.
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.
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there is already a program like that, its been running for ages, its called PLSF. Still not enough teachers.
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...
People who critique H1B always seem to assume that people actually hiring for labor are much dumber than those bright commenters and haven't exhausted each and every other opportunity to find qualified people.
No, you are not being smarter than lawmakers who enacted H1B program, and then refused to dismantle it at every opportunity to do so. You are not smarter than employers who have to hire via H1B and pay tens of thousands dollars to immigration lawyers for stupid paperwork.
Most of the critique of H1B in this post is just bigoted, hateful, and uneducated rant
you said "smarter" in this comment when a more accurate term is "corrupt". Being unable to find a candidate for your given budget requires that you either increase the budgeted salary or decrease the requirements, and train on the job. If you cannot do either of these, your company MUST fail. It is inhumane to demolish the US working class by importing foreign scab labor. Too much labor supply (aka immigration) decreases fair market value for wages. That alone is more than enough justification for ending all immigration of any significant amount.
Handwaving away significant issues as "bigotry, etc" is unhelpful to the discussion. We haven't even covered the impact on housing supply, as illustrated by Canada's insane valuations.
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Hardly an argument to import teachers on work visas.
It's literally exactly the argument.
If teachers were underpaid - it would be a poor argument.
But if there's an acute shortage of 'key' workers in jobs that require education, for jobs where wages are materially above market pricing - then this is where you want H1B type programs.
The idea is that it should not harm the local market for labour, and it's usually not reasonable to expect market wages to be a radical departure from where they would be otherwise.
Aka - if teachers are earning $80K on average, then it's not going to work out i some small towns need to pay $150K to bring people in from the city, it also creates problems for locals.
Special worker programs can be well utilized here in the right circumstances.
The 'bad' scenario is when labour market is flooded where those jobs would otherwise go to locals.
Tata/Infosys (generic IT workers) are alone probably 80% of the problem.
This would hold more weight if teachers in rural areas weren't getting paid less than half your thought experiment average.
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Teachers are underpaid. No occupation paying under median wage in the area should be granted work visa.
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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.
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so you want to leave rural children without teachers?
I think the commenter is volunteering to go themselves.
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