I hear this argument all the time. There's an excess of this, there's an excess of that. Seems it only comes from people who are not directly involved in hiring of such roles. We hired for an analyst role few months ago in the bay area and there was no qualified American applicants. My wife is in pavement consultancy and they hardly ever find qualified Americans for pavement design jobs.

Is there an excess of teachers in Alaska?

I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that.

Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.

> No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.

Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.

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.

But evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.

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.

This was the most infuriating part.

Big Tech has multiple carveouts to bring tech labor using F1/J1/L1/O1/EB-1 and various other visas, and they wouldn't even feel the 100k fee given their budgets.

While non-tech sectors were the ones most affected

Which is sadly very ironic.

> is there shortage of teachers in USA?

No, there is a steady stream of teachers being fed into the maw of public education. The pay is low and job security is terrible until you get tenure. My wife was a teacher; I have heard horror stories.

You get paid based on a combination of how much money you earn your employer and how easy you are to replace. Schools get paid by taxes, and there are a ton of them produced every year. So, the pay is abysmal.

Teacher pay is low, but it also requires certification and a degree. And in exchange it will be relatively stressful and lacking in prestige.

Rural Alaska is by and large very very remote. Often small plane is the only practical access and then only in favorable weather.

Recruiting teachers to remote villages with extreme weather is hard and if you are at US university training to be a teacher you will probably have other options that are more attractive as a young person.

Little bit of both. Pay varies drastically from state to state, even taking cost of living into account. By the time you pay for a degree and a credential the ROI isn't great. Jobs in better paying areas exist too but are understandably more competitive

The "Alaska" bit is very important. Very remote, very cold. Everything is very expensive because almost all of it has to be shipped in by air.

Yes, the US teacher pay is generally crap and we're short on teachers everywhere, but Alaska is a rather unique situation.

It's 16% of the US's land area, but only 0.2% of the population.

Teachers are paid less than they should be and and must complete specific undergraduate and graduate 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.

Are they also using traditional incentive methods, like signing bonuses, for domestic prospects?

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.

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. Here, the $100k fee certainly reflects the value to the employer of being able to hire the worker.

> 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.

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.

Oh wont somebody please think of the Tim Hortons.

You're confusing H1B with PERM. H1B has no job posting requirements.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...

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?

Any legal barrier will just be cheated around.

>Rigorous examinations for English fluency and for competency in their alleged field of expertise would be a good start.

I have a good friend who came in as H1B and is now a citizen. I have also worked with many H1Bs who were absolutely terrible and definitely shouldn't be in the country. What I've noticed is that the key difference seems to be which country you are from. He is from a first world country with education standards. The ones who were no good came from the third world where fake diplomas are for sale cheap. It won't matter what qualifications we screen for if the third world happily prints up those fake qualifications for a small fee. I was sent so many candidates to interview who knew absolutely nothing, but they shamelessly put the proper keywords on their resume.

Many of the people I grew up with "barely speak intelligible English". Communication is important and the easiest way to fix that is to bring people from your linguistic group to be a coworker....

> 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

All of them have US subsidiaries and Cognizant is an US listed company.

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"

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....

>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).

> 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.

The 45th president was supposed to deliver that reform. Then they went all out and... commissioned a study. Then they did nothing, once the puppet masters let it be know they didn't want to lose their servile work force chained to their visas with a green card dangled in front of them.

They raise the cost of housing and suppress wages. The people who benefit from immigration are the billionaire class.

Sundar Pichai is a terrible example, he presided over the enshittification of Google and led the company basically nowhere. Satya Nadella is a similar story for Microsoft. The real reason Google is turning around on AI is because the founders quietly returned and have been leading the charge internally to save Google.

>the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere.

1/2 of Google's founders were Americans born in the US and the search industry already existed before Google was founded. I don't think there's a real argument that the search industry would have been founded anywhere else other than in the US. There's virtually no chance that had Sergei Brin's family stayed in Moscow, that Google would have been founded in Moscow and all of Google's jobs would today somehow exist in Russia. Same goes for Nvidia and all of these other companies. Silicon Valley was already a booming hub which had invented almost all of the foundational tech that today's computing industry was built on. It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, if you don't allow immigration. Schools will have to pay more for teachers, which will raise salaries for native born teachers, instead of paying a lower rate to someone on a temporary work visa.

The matter is a little more complicated than that, because Alaska also has some of the nation's most stringent licensure requirements with no alternative routes for high-demand low-supply subject area teachers. You could probably relax those artificial barriers to employment and get more Alaskans teaching without raising the salary as much as if you kept the licensure requirements. You could also promise student debt relief for teachers who serve in rural areas for a certain length of time.

> unwillingness to fund education.

"The United States spent $15,500 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 38 percent higher than the average of OECD countries3 reporting data ($11,300). The United States had the fifth highest expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level in 2019 after Luxembourg, Norway ($18,000), and Austria and the Republic of Korea ($15,900 each)."

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

>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...

I'm sure the supply will go up if extra $$$ is paid.

...for the given price.

Recently the Supreme Court has curtailed these nationwide injuctions: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/supreme-court-sides-with-...

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

If you genuine shortage is not worth some 33k a year, it's not a genuine shortage.