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Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
171–180 of 375 posts
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#172Heaven forbid we could pay better! Something something market signals... not like Alaska is hurting for money.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ? 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
>Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ? That sounds sort of racist, actually.
Americans are every race. How could it be racist?
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#174For those not reading the linked article, it was not about tech (although valid discussions here). I had not expected this (this is about rural Alaska): > “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 fin…
There are an excess of teachers in the USA already. It’s a big reason they aren’t paid that well. No good reason to import them except to pay them even less .
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.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#175The ruling was from a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and was an Obama appointee. The case was brought by 20 Democratic-controlled states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D).
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...
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#176I’m going to call this one as likely to be overturned on appeal. The Immigration and Naturalization Act provides:
“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.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rigorous examinations for English fluency and for competency in their alleged field of expertise would be a good start. I have several H1B coworkers in the US who barely speak intelligible English, and who barely understand normal conversation let alone anything technical. A blatant example of this that I experienced recently being that several of them could not understand that just because a method in C# is asynchro…
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?
>and no language tests
English test is a requirement for naturalization, which is governed by the same INA, which governs H1B and other visas.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty. 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 li…
> What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?
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.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
But evidently they don’t want to move to rural America.
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 hous…
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.
Re: Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty. 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 li…
> Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries
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.