Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee

The alternative isn't that rural communities get doctors born in the US, it's that they get no doctors.

But are they? Or are they just willing and here for the money and foot in the immigration door? Sincere question, though I have negative views of the whole H1B thing in general (not a US national, though).

1) Why is that the dichotomy?

2) Do you say the same thing about well-paid oilfield workers living in RVs, away from their families and social networks?

3) Do you think the foreign workers are happy to be in Alaska for the sake of the Alaskan experience?

For some reason, people are convinced that teacher salaries have to be suppressed, lest the "wrong people" take the jobs. As if stressing about making rent is a critical signal of virtue, exclusively for teaching.

Likely a bigger issue is that very few people want to live in a town of 3000 people or less that isn't connected to the interstate road system. Money can only do so much to fix that.

(A) individual must be interested in job/benefits/comp. and decide to apply. This makes them a ‘candidate’ (B) candidate must be qualified per minimum requirements

It’s entirely possible to not have candidates if no one is interested in the position at the stated comp/benefit rate.

Let’s say a rural town has lost population in the last 20 years, and most of the population that left is educated.

Now they need a teacher, which requires a bachelors or even masters degree.

The rural town’s unemployment rate is 10% but there are no qualified teachers who are unemployed.

So now we want to move someone in from a nearby urban center that has a big market of educated people. But the unemployment rate in that big urban area is 3%, and the area is wealthier with a higher salary rate for jobs across the income spectrum.

Let’s say my local teacher salary is $50,000, the big city teacher salary is $90,000, and the big city high school diploma career salary is $50,000.

I have to find someone who is a qualified teacher who isn’t already a teacher and isn’t already working someone where else that’s still paying better than my local area. Plus, that person has family, friends, and prefers the big city with all its amenities and infrastructure. I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move because I’m already employed and happy.

In contrast, someone in a foreign country is potentially getting a huge upgrade to move to the US or another developed wealthy country and is way more motivated to make that leap.

I imagine these programs exist because the cost benefit just makes sense. Not only do you solve the imbalance faster, easier, cheaper, but now the wider country has gained educated population which is generally an economic benefit.

Certainly there are flaws in the system that need to be fixed. I don’t mean to advocate for it necessarily, just explain why I think it exists.

I would also point out that it’s not necessarily the case that the local labor market is being undercut (see the geographic example I gave above), it’s being expanded, and that includes adding someone who is paying taxes, buying stuff from local businesses, etc, which they do even before they become citizens.

4+ years in product development. Python/R + a low-level language. Terabyte-scale data stream and batch processing. HPC knowledge (vectorization, memory access, distributed computing) to build efficient algorithms. Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Stats, Physics, CS, or Engineering).

Upper limit on compensation was 200k.

> Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

You answered your own question. The American engineering pool consists mostly of high school diplomas who can't pass PE exam at multiple trials.

Edit: coincidentally, my wife was offered a state civil engineering job in Bay area. Didn't take up because the salary offered was below 100k, even with 5 years of experience.

It does not generally. H1B employees are more expensive usually. In most companies - like any notable tech company - they are paid exactly the same due to fixed compensation plans, but cost more to the company once you include legal fees, processing fees, and especially the time delays and risks. It’s not even close in terms of a cost comparison. This isn’t a controversy among people who are actually involved in hiring and compensation - it’s well known. But this perception persists.

I've seen those kind of proposals as ballot measures that get voted down.

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

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.

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.

Your post actually explains why every single classmate of my daughter has enrolled in private middle school ($50k+ tuition), despite being in the best school district (Palo Alto School District).

Apparently public middle schools are really bad in California, but you can still find decent high and elementary schools

All top private middle schools in the bay are oversubscribed and cannot accomodate everyone, and require ridiculous exams and admission process that rivals Ivy League, situation is really bad, and demand for good teachers is infinite

And Seattle is a long way from most of the US…another 3300km from Chicago.

At the end of the day shall-issue permits, hyper specialized taxes, and fees all seem to amount to the same thing. However I think you can probably construct a reasonable criteria based on whether or not the other side of the transaction is fulfilled by the government and whether or not it is legal to do the thing by default. By that logic sales taxes and car tabs would indeed be taxes while fishing and camping permits would both be fees.

The whole penalty thing seems weird because obviously it’s not a penalty, so I don’t know if the president’s lawyers argued a dumb point and lost or if I’m missing some legal nuance here.

Regardless, the opinion is based on the ruling that the fee amounts to a tax, not that fees must be justified.

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.

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 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 workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, and in the non-university hiring pipelines I have seen, the English/ESL tests seem to be common if you are not from an English-speaking country, so if you are seeing people where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a better look at your employer's hiring practices.

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?

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..

How is it a bad decision that will hurt the US? Can you make that argument on its merits? No one doubts that there isn't that one genius here or there

Last year, right here on HN I saw a headline where the "powers that be" wanted to increase Canada's population to 100 million (they currently sit at 30ish million). Is that a good decision for Canada? Where the fertility rate is so low population is shrinking? Like, do they need another 65 million people? Are there 65 million jobs going undone in Canada right now? Jobs that desperately need doing? The plan's the same for the United States, even if no one was careless enough to blare a similar headline from trumpets.

Using the word "immigrant" to blanket all people who have moved here, as if anyone who moves to the US is exactly the same, is a trick. Someone who moves here from Norway is obviously not the same as someone who moves here from Chad. The settlers who built towns and cities from raw wilderness are obviously not the same as someone who gets on a plane and flies to New York to claim free government benefits.

They are different in a million ways, and using "immigrant" to blend them together is a sleight of hand. Anyone with common sense understands that the nation of the USA is/was a place with a specific culture and genetic makeup. Indeed much of Silicon Valley was built and founded during what was a period of very LOW immigration (1950's and 1960's).

To expand even more: importing people from a place makes your country more like the place those people come from. Europe had invented and built incredible things when the USA was founded, almost EVERY immigrant who came to the US until 1965 was from Europe. It's no wonder that the USA became the world's only superpower. Since 1965 we have switched our policy to import people from the entire planet (at much higher numbers than before) and we are pretending that it will have the same result as importing only Europeans.