Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

Can every industry pay $200k? I bet software, AI, or finance would be okay paying $200k, while e.g. hardware, aerospace, or biotech would have a harder time.

The idea of requiring a high salary is reasonable, but I'd make it rather e.g. 120% of the median salary in a particular industry.

If they can pay a $100k fee, they can pay a similarly higher wage instead

Who would have a harder time? The company that wants to bring in employees? Sure. But I'm also sure that the top experts would be lining up to take such a job. The companies wouldn't struggle to find someone abroad.

The percentage could be reasonable, but I think it's too easily gamed. You just know the company would try and say they are bringing in entry level people for whatever they want and use whatever lowest median they could find. There needs to be a fairly significant minimum salary to avoid such monkey business.

An H1B job should be cushy. Otherwise, the company should simply raise salaries to find local workers.

Dare I say - If you're desperate for skilled workers, they should probably be highly compensated due to simple supply and demand.

If you can't find somebody skilled enough here to work for 200k or less, then you should probably be paying 200k or more since you're looking for a role that is niche and low supply.

This makes sense if H1-Bs are about lack of talent instead of cheap labor.

Since we have relatively reliable economic data on median income per industry, it would be really stupid not to use that data in a formula such as the one you suggested.

To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically. It would probably be wise to use that in the formula as well, so as not to disadvantage smaller areas, where cost-of-living and salaries are lower.

> To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically.

I like the goal of making sure visa works are paid well for where they live.

I would not want to restrict the visa worker geographically though. Or alternatively I am unsure about the overhead of tracking the location visa holders and enforcing salary changes.

Might also have unintended knock on effect of encouraging job growth in low cost of living areas.

The entire market works through supply and demand. The basic idea is if you can't find someone willing to work for $x an hour you have to raise x until you find someone.

The h1bs are often used to abuse that system by just importing someone willing to work for x, with the added bonus of it being very hard for them to ever leave your company.

There's also a bunch of organizations that are desperate and can't pay. E.g. a lot of rural and VA hospitals are staffed by H1B physicians. A rural hospital in the middle of Idaho won't attract a cardiologist through salary (i.e. the 500k/yr they can make in cities) and probably won't be able to afford a 100k application fee to get one. Also for lots of researchers and post-docs, 100k is more than their annual salary.

This fee is a great way to ensure that there's very little medical services available to rural populations and to help kill science in the US among other things.

It might be that in that industry, paying someone the $200k might mean the position doesn't make sense compared to the value delivered, and that you should instead open up another offshore office

This is why I say about the median salary across a branch of industry. A company is free to bring in anyone they want, but not free to pay them entry-level salary then. They should rather pay entry-level salary to local folks, e.g. recent graduates. The point is to bring above-average workers from abroad, as you say.

I don't think it's easy to game the median number, or the third quartile number if you prefer. Unless the salary distribution is severely bimodal, it should work reasonably.

> Also for lots of researchers and post-docs, 100k is more than their annual salary.

Don't post docs usually come over on J-1s (if they aren't using practical training)?

There are plenty of first-rate medical schools in the US, it's very possible to increase the supply of qualified doctors to re-balance. Yes it will probably mean a similar scenario where doctors are paid somewhat less than they have been previously, but hey, look how bad engineering has gotten these past 20-something years relative to where it once was as a comparable profession to medicine.

Exactly. The difference is doctors were able to cap the number of doctors graduated, and now we have a shortage. Welp, I know the solution to that.

> E.g. a lot of rural and VA hospitals are staffed by H1B physicians.

Doctors, pilots and other genuinely essential professions are well covered by a number of other visa categories, such as EB-2.

This already happens. One of the ways of qualifying for a National Interest Waiver for doctors, for example is by agreeing to work for some time in a designated underserved area.

All things like this should be percentages/ratios. The idea of using $ amounts in legislation and regulation is fundamentally foolish.

I'm from Idaho and grew up in rural Idaho. My mother was a nurse for such a hospital.

Rural hospitals are lucky to have any doctor on staff let alone a cardiologist. They are mostly staffed by nurses for quick patch-up work and life flights to major medical centers.

H1B doesn't solve the problem of poor communities getting poor healthcare. Frankly, it costs too much to become a doctor which limits where doctors can be employed. Plenty would like to work rural, but not with $500,000 in student loans. And no, that's no joke. I have a nephew going to medical school in Idaho and that's what his loans are.

The cost of becoming an MD is astronomical. I have a nephew currently studying for it and he's looking at $500,000 in student loans. For a school in idaho of all places.

Part of the shortage is also because very few people can afford to become doctors.

I just read a thread earlier today in the medical-professionals /r/medicine group of reddit that had a lot of participation from medical people:

"My rural patients are so much more insufferable than my urban ones"

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1nkb8f9/my_rural_...

It seems that the reasons for missing doctors are... complex.

> it's very possible to increase the supply of qualified doctors to re-balance.

In many cases, the rebalancing that is needed is from subspecialties to community based primary care in rural and other underserved areas. Some new medical schools appeared in the 1970’s to address the need for more family medicine docs. What happened was completely predictable… more subspecialists. Graduates follow the money trail when choosing residencies and fellowships.

> My rural patients are so much more insufferable than my urban ones…

I retired from medicine, having spent my career at a well-known institution in the upper midwest of the U.S. Over the course of my tenure there, I took care of patients from all parts of the world, all walks of life. Some of my most cherished patients hailed from rural farm communities. Whatever that commenter’s issues might be, this doesn’t line up with my experience at all. The work of the physician is to tailor their work to meet the needs of the patient by understanding their needs in ways that may be difficult to discern through ways other than empathic understanding.

The MD shortage is entirely artificial - limited by the number of taxpayer-funded residency slots, itself a result of federal congressional action (or inaction). You may ask, why is the taxpayer on the hook for resident training, when there already oceans worth of government and citizen money flowing into healthcare? Because the healthcare industry lobbied for it.

I don't think the EB-2 is an alternative. If the applicant is outside the US, the process takes ~3 years to get the applicant into the US and up to 4-12 years if the applicant is Chinese or Indian.

I don't think the EB-2 process allows the applicant to stay within the US while waiting for the priority date to become current so staying in the US and working during that 3-12 year period won't work without another visa type.

Except for the DOE student loan programs just capped loans for med school to 200k lifetime so unless students are fairly wealthy, they're going to find it hard to become a doctor.

That's what they're supposed to be about. OP proposed a way to put that into practice. Of course it is abused for cheap labor

It is not about that one commenter, I would not have posted it for a single anecdote. I read through most of the comments. While there are voices like yours, the many people having similar things to say as the OP, and what exactly they say, DO make it sound like they have something interesting to say. Given the quality of many of the comments there, I don't think simply ignoring it with a counter-example is correct.

There are no empty slots for med school in America. We turn qualified kids away.

Reddit and internet forums have a bias for negative anecdotes.

Do you have any proof or even just actual argument whatsoever that the very specific thread I linked to has any such alleged problems? Did you actually even bother to read the many comments there? Unlike your single-phrase blanket statement they are actually quite thoughtful. You could learn a thing or to on Internet discussions from that thread.

There was no prediction or conclusion made whatsoever, it was a number of for the Internet quite high quality personal observations. If you are unable or unwilling to accept the personal observations of those people, here doctors, then the issue is on your side.

We also know that there indeed is a significant difference in culture, we can see that in elections and elsewhere. That too is a "known bias", which you also ignore.

For example:

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-electoral-coll...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07430...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...

So differences in general are real, and you cannot simply dismiss any anecdotes as "bias", especially since there never was a claim for that thread to be anything more than that.

This divide is also not the same all over the globe, the US may be more extreme (example: https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/news/2024/03/t... -- "Compared to the US, UK and Canada, overall levels of urban-rural electoral divides are still substantially lower in most European countries, due to centrist parties attracting support from both urban and rural areas."). That too has some interesting comments showing this in that thread, with the bad anecdotes coming mostly from US doctors.

The question to ask is why it costs so much to become a doctor in the USA vs other countries and then work to address that.

A serious problem should not be treated with a band-aid and if you think a band-aid is ok do not be surprised the problem gets worse.