> “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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It would need to be more than just competitive, it would probably need to be doctor-tier "I'm giving up my life plans for this salary in Alaska" level (which is what I assume it's like for foreign labor).
It's possible they can afford it. I would think they would need to double or more their education spending (~$2.77 billion (24/25), ~45% -> wages) state wide which would be most of what the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out per year ($3-4 billion) [4][5]
I imagine it would be politically very unpopular for obvious reasons.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...
[2] https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/?major_group=250000&occupati... (increase records to see Alaska)
[3] https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2024
https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/annual-reports/2025
[4] https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2025/06/alaskas-schools-are-ro...
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.
H1B proceeds go to fund USCIS and its staff, they do not go towards local school districts.
This whole discussion is full of racists and haters who dont know anything about the subject beyond clickbait titles
That sounds sort of racist, actually.
https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/1954326425072546055/pho...
https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...
The average SAT for Education majors: 1023
It’s ranked 24th, behind Communications (19th), Library Science (13th), and English (11th). The top major: Math.
People who look at the stats objectively should be the first ones to advocate for more H1B teachers, if that meant children would get dramatically better education
If you imply that teachers on visa are somehow inferior or worse then citizen teachers (non-existent btw since noone is volunteering for Alaska gig), you are either being terribly misinformed or just bigoted.
I find it harder to learn if I have to decipher the words not the content. This is true for lots of different accents. This is a common experience for those not overindexing on ethnonarcissism.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
Second most visa applicants already get tested on their English skill when they apply for Visa, for example, universities require English proficiency for F1 visa using GRE exam
And why do you think you are better than an employer in assessing required English proficiency of an employee
Why would the universities fail them on these exams, when it would mean losing out on that sweet, sweet tuition money?
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.
The Constitutional Convention discussed a national language at length in 1789, and adamantly didn't include a language requirement on purpose.
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...
No reason to give the fascist LARPers the respect. Just don't give the poor clerk forced to regurgitate the junk a hard time.
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
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.
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.
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?
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312908
[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
https://www.newsweek.com/h1b-job-ads-green-cards-targeted-im...
it is a goodwill compliance, not malicious. You are again just being racist and uneducated about the subject and reasons for that requirement
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.
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?
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.
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..
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.
Perhaps it’s time for to GTFO? Is that the message?
Hacker News really resembles a MAGA rally at times
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5xp7B7ISI1DymhuoGuoN_WWl...
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.
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.
If they already live in the US, they're not applying for an H1B.
H1B renewals are also common, and happen within the US.
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
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.