HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
46% Positive
Analyzed from 6916 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#fee#alaska#teachers#pay#job#tax#more#rural#visa#don
Discussion (332 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> “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.
No good reason to import them except to pay them even less.
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.
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.
I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.
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.
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.
I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me
Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.
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.
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.
The people voting for these administration are the ones cutting government spending and lower taxes and then say “pay more”. With what dollars exactly?
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.
Then I'll tell you a good one. It's called profit.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.
> By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public.
That seems to apply to both taxes and fees as far as I can tell. It seems to me that a tax can primarily be distinguished by virtue of not qualifying as a fee. Put another way, are not fees paid to a government a subset of taxes much as squares are a subset of rectangles?
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.
Calling something a fee doesn't make it a fee if, in substance, it operates like a tax.
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.
https://www.uscis.gov/about-us/budget-planning-and-performan...
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.
Read the opinion, it isn’t very long. This facet in particular is discussed in detail there.
> They gave a definition of fee vs tax that is based on a meaningful distinction and not what it happens to be called.
GP sounds likes he’s trying out for the inevitable appeal, the tax/fee distinctions argued in the case came from different case law.
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.
There’s something massively wrong with bringing over tons of cheap labour, who are themselves constantly exploited and abused due to their precarious arrangement, creating a situation where they have no reason to care about the society or culture they’re moving into, because it obviously doesn’t care about them.
They are lied to, cheated from, and stolen from, and are the victims of racism. In turn, a disproportionate number of them will lie, cheat, steel, and exercise racism, or casteism. That’s not specific to Indians, that’s just human nature. As a result, the trust level in society is collapsing.
The Indians are not the source of the problem here, the businesses and politicians who created this environment are. The Indians are another group of victims. They are sold false promises and set up for exploitation, and desperate people in an insecure position are not a good foundation for a healthy society.
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.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...
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.
Having actually worked at a Spanish language news outlet before (1 of 4 tv and radio stations in the office I was doing IT help desk work in), I can tell you that every single employee spoke English somewhere on the level of very good to near native fluency. As it turns out, knowing English (or the native language of whatever country you're in) is an incredible value-multiplier for almost every job position imaginable.
As far as language issues at my current job goes, it turns out once you hire a manager that speaks both Hindi and English (or Marathi and English, or Bengali and English, you get the picture) it doesn't matter much if the H1Bs he hires barely speak English because he can just start shouting at them in Hindi if they don't understand (even if several native English speakers are in the meeting too).
English test is a requirement for naturalization, which is governed by the same INA, which governs H1B and other visas.
When the law specifically dictates stuff like the talent of the person, I’m not convinced you’re correct.
Oh but it does. And it's English,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/06/2025-03...
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.
Want to bet how many naturally born US citizens in your colleagues can answer the question in a technical interview?
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.
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
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.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312908
[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/h1b-job-ads-green-cards-targeted-im...
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"
Americans can't 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....
If I lose my job I have unemployment insurance, cobra benefits, personal savings, and I don’t require another employer to sponsor my visa. If I lose my job the most likely outcome is I find another one after searching a few months.
If someone on an H1B visa loses their job the most likely outcome is they are forced to leave the country.
I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least, and you can save up as a countermeasure to the loss of the paycheck. Bad as it is it's not comparable to getting deported after a couple of months.
You could offer me twice what I make as a software engineer and I wouldn’t take the job.
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.
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).
Do you find the argument "I have the right to make any decision I want therefor it justifies bad decisions" convincing? I sure don't.
If they already live in the US, they're not applying for an H1B.
H1B renewals are also common, and happen within the US.
This actually highlights two dumb things about the USA: prejudice against immigrants, and unwillingness to fund education.
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.
It already exists its called PSLF
Alaska is already one of the top states for educator pay, and as you know how US government has continioualy failed to solve problems by throwing more money at it, you know more money will simply cause more general inflation and will never solve it.
US already spends more for education with worse results
"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...
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...
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.
The xenophobic ignorance of this sentence is breathtaking. America, of all places, is a nation built precisely by immigrants.
Oh! how dare they! How can they even think of finding a place to live
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
The Trump admin already did that too:
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-pro...
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.
Education is an investment to the future generation and must not be overlooked.
And they not gonna have the same near slave H1B conditions where changing their job is just impossible..
H1B workers in IT even have an option to find a new visa sponsor, but nobody needs foreign teacher with H1B in California or Texas or basically anywhere else.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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...
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.
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.
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.