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

Creating low cost alternatives and taking advance of lax laws is part of that. If you can import 100k skilled workers per year under a scheme that gives you more power over them. Then you also offshore 300k jobs per year to countries with weaker protections.

It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

If you divide the GDP by the number of employed people (including self-employed and entrepreneurs), you get a bit over $180k/person. The median full-time income is a bit over $60k. In other words, as a gross simplification, the mean worker earns 80% more than the median worker.

The comparable numbers for Germany are a ~€100k, ~€45k, and 35%. If something is hollowing out the American middle class, it might be the high earners rather than the capital.

Importing cheap foreign labor to undercut unions and lower wages is one of the spokes of the wheel used by capital to reduce the power of labor (and always has been).

You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....

The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.

Why's that? The jobs and lives of individuals in those countries are better than the alternatives present otherwise to them. Globalization may hurt certain America jobs but certainly countries like India is grateful for all of the engineering roles.

High consumerism is harmful to the environment but I don't think the link between offshoring jobs is direct to environmental harms and certainly it's helpful to giving more job opportunites.

Instead they'll be made unemployed by AI and a crashing tech economy.

But that isn't the point of this. It's leverage - much like the tariffs.

Big companies making significant donations to the Donald Trump Presidential Aggrandisement Fund will receive carve-outs and exclusions.

It's a grift, like everything else done by this benighted administration.

I don't quite agree that much with causes: high housing, Healthcare & med bankruptcy, and high education costs (correlating with high housing) are bigger factors. However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.

Now, the top 5% and corps need to be made to pay more taxes... thats another subject.

A couple elderly people i know are quite concerned Trump will take their snap benefits, or decrease medicaid/care etc while the tax reductions were given on the bb bill. Thats not acceptable.

As you said, the story is complicated. Even in 2015, a decade ago:

> There is one other stark difference: only upper-income families realized notable gains in wealth from 1983 to 2013.

During the period of analysis then, either consumption among the lower two tiers eliminated their available savings ability, or the real purchasing power over this period declined, leading to the same effect.

That's not to say you shouldn't do it! But the problem is elsewhere.

We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all.

Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.

You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win.

No, we aren't! We have statistics on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). Median real income is up substantially since 40-50 years ago, depending on what you count as a generation. And we have stories and records of what life was like in the 1970s, when 80% of households had to hand wash dishes and 50% had to line-dry clothes. The reason people believe living standards haven't risen since their grandparents' day is that they get false nostalgia bait depictions of how a typical person lived in their grandparents' day.

(What is true, and what I'm sure contributes to the power of the nostalgia bait, is that real income stagnated with the dot-com bubble and didn't hit a sustained rise again until the mid-late 2010s.)

While you are correct that real wages are up around 25%, productivity has nearly doubled. While various consumer goods, and technology have seen large improvements - ignoring the measurable and qualitative ways that affording basic aspects of life have become more difficult is not wise.

Sorry for hijacking, but this is quite possibly one of the funniest American poverty markers around.

This could be a tactic to force lower end to go home and accept a lower salary at the same company for their same role.

up or out. or in this cause, over or out...

Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).

It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.

What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.

Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.

Global trade as made consumer prices competitive in many things, but those are a big three.

Nostalgia was not at root of my original comment.

Specifically when you say:

>Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.

We can observe that the Globalist organizations regard not just pollution, but carbon consumption to be something which markets cannot be trusted to manage. Instead they propose top-down regulatory management on a supranational level.

https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...

This is simple supply and demand. If you restrict the labor supply, the value of labor increases.

The same thing was observed after the Black Death, which killed off 30 to 50% of Europe's population. There were labor shortages, which increased the bargaining power of labor, and increased wages.

It's really funny US companies suddenly start pretending they don't believe in supply and demand when it comes to labor.

Immigrants need houses built, food on the table and many work very hard to pay for that.

That work, that sweat equity makes us all more wealth, a higher GDP.

Natives of the country that are well established in the country are in a better position to capture that wealth than the immigrants.

Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.

When one lives in a tiny apartment with no balcony, you better have a dryer. When living with plenty of land, it's not a problem to hang clothes to dry in the sun.

My euro family disagrees, even in places that don’t have a balcony. Get the rack out and dry indoors and it’s pretty dry overnight (in the not so humid places).

I have a dryer but avoid it for most clothes because I think it wears them out.

I am not. I am generally confused at what you would suggest is wrong with the GDP measurement.

We have multiple layers of agencies reporting on GDP and other economic measures the US. There are certainly some troublesome siloed measures (CPI), but I wasn't aware that GDP was one of them.

Your take doesn't seem relevant with regard to my knowledge on the subject.

I also do not care about your "knowledge" on the subject.

While this chart shows "real" income increases we apparently also see "real" increases on housing, rents, education, etc.

If your inflation metric is only on rolled oats, then it is not really worth much, is it?

If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)

Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.

Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...

Let’s look at US imports from China. Last year that was $462bn worth of goods. Suppose the development of China never happened and all those goods were manufactured in the USA instead. That’s impossible, the US doesn’t have tens of millions of industrial workers lying around spare to do those mostly low end, low value jobs and if it did they would cost more and the goods would all be much more expensive. So the cost of living would go up, the economy would less efficient because many workers would be doing lower value add jobs than they are now. The country would be much worse off overall. It would basically amount to enormous government subsidies and protections for vast swathes of lower value assembly work than what many people are doing now.

I support global trade because I think it’s best for the west. Not hyper-liberal ultra free market trade. Negotiated, rules based, moderately regulated trade and investment that is balanced to meet domestic and international needs.

Hey it's iPhone Day, "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish"* ---

*-nevermind the $10000 workstation named after a gf or more recently $2000 orange phones (I bought a DEEP Blue because Apple is always threatening to "Care-Deeply" me), $1000 watches and $300 earpieces for errbody. So Hungry. Also, we'll make sure you never work anywhere in Tech again if you even so much as interview for a new job outside of our company and Non-Competes Are No Longer Blocked! But What the Helly..Turtleneck also didn't invent the hungry mantra which is embraced by many other similar brilliant people, from Einstein to Elon'n-on and of course, my dad's gang one of whom brought Turtleneck back to Apple.) Get it? Got it? Good.

"Real income" is measured against the consumer price index (CPI). CPI is used to gauge inflation, "are people paying more for groceries this year than last?", not living standard. Most of the important questions like "how many years of education do you need for a good job?" or "how many average salaries do you need for a good home?" are all massively worse. So are many metrics of despair.

What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less. That what buys you a loaf of bread doesn't buy you a good life anymore. Because median income might be keeping up with inflation, but not with anything else.

This is why many places in the world no longer produce enough food to feed their populations - refrigeration and cheap oil enable food to no longer be a local commodity. Education is sometimes headed in the same direction. But housing cannot be sourced anywhere but locally.

Its nice to have as a last resort or during winter tho.

Though in this position, maybe China gets greedy.

My grandma slowly squirreled away money in a shoe box over decades as she had no personal bank account and lived on what my grandpa provided while she took care of seven kids. She saw it as her lifeline. Meanwhile he got drunk every night at the yacht club.

When the last of the kids were nearing college she spent that money on classes for clerical work and got a job.

I could not possibly imagine being in her shoes and I can imagine why a woman would be loathe to enter into such dependence on another person, regardless of how fulfilling child rearing and house keeping may be.

And the further you go back from there the worse it looks for women.

Unfortunately last several millions came for exactly the opposite. Free full government support, aka communism.

Are you sure it's really been/being hollowed out or are you just repeating something you've heard or read other people state so often that you think it's true?

In the case of bringing in workers; those workers are less likely to join unions or demand good working conditions since they are effectively indentured servants. That also is bad for labor.

This doesn't map exactly to "middle class" but it also seems like there's now a lot less ability for people to afford to work in "artist" type careers. It used to be that you could wait tables, get a low cost studio in the city, and work as an artist in the evenings/weekends. Now you have to work multiple jobs and probably still can't afford to live in the city and make art.

America is similar. Ignore the homeless, the people who can't afford basic trips to the doctor, the illegal immigrant underclass, hope the crime problem never affects you, and focus on your own money, and it's fine.

I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.

Sure, but the vast majority of the wealth of building SpaceX and Google doesn't go to me. It goes to people like Musk and Larry Page.

One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well.

The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble.

Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target).

[1]: https://wid.world/country/usa/

[2]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...

Intelligence is not equally distributed. The vast majority of human populations have close to no talents. Your best bets are Euros, East Asians, and upper caste Greater Indians. That means we shouldn't compare 300+ million with 8 billion, but the majority of talent is still clearly born outside the US.

Just a clarification -- you probably agree.

I'm pretty sure my local pizza shop, waitstaff, and other small businesses are happy to have my money spent on their products and services. They don't care that I have a tech job, but they do care that I spend money with them, and spending money with them is only one degree of separation from having a job.

For instance one of the key factors in society escaping feudalism and moving onto market based economies was the Black Death. It absolutely decimated society and the labor pool. This gave labor the power to demand more compensation than a share of what they produced. But in times before if they tried that then nobility could simply have said no, as there were plenty of peasants willing to work for little more than food. But when the labor supply was suddenly cut in half? Now they had all the power in the world.

Labor unions can't really combat market forces. I don't even think ethical or moral arguments work either. If somebody, in the country legally, is willing to do your job for less money, and is capable of doing so, then by what right do you have to insist that you should be the one doing your job and getting paid more? It doesn't really make much sense. If you want to increase the power of labor then, by far, the easiest way to reduce so is to reduce the supply of labor. And vice versa for weakening it.

H1B is explicitly a dual intent visa.

It’s a non immigrant visa but also a pathway to citizenship.

And this is not just an abstract thing. There are, for example, very specific tax implications of this.

The dual intent nature of the H1B visa means the U.S. government requires H1B holders to pay Social Security and Medicare, precisely because the dual intent nature implies that they will be able to utilize those entitlements in the future.

earlier wife beating was „normal thing” leaving abusive partners was not possible or much harder than nowadays.

Then in a lot of places in the world it still is like that.

That said, I think you underestimate many places. For example, Iran is one of the most ancient civilizations out there, and the Persian diaspora in the US is pretty productive, even though the country proper is a retrograde tyranny with very bad economy.

So what are the metrics that you’re using other than GDP to justify your position

So what gives with your data set? The data set I give covers wages for full time workers. The data set you gave covers all individuals 15+ with any "income", which includes governments benefits. So what you're likely seeing there is going to be, in part, driven by things like an aging population - with a large number of retirees retiring with social security, medicaid, pensions, etc fattening out the middle part of society where income, after all is accounted for, of around $40k sounds just about right. It's mostly unrelated to the change in wages.

---

Also, unrelated but I found your examples of 'better life' weird. I still hand wish dishes and line-dry clothes. I know Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates also hand wash their dishes. The "nostalgia" people have is for things like somebody graduating debt free, with a decent car, and ready to put a down payment on the first home - on the back of a part time job that put them through school. That really did happen, but now a days it sounds like a fantasy. I think society would happily trade dish washers for that!

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Their expectations might be to live in the top few decile neighborhoods of a metro, where land prices have gone up a few hundred thousand in the previous decade.

It doesn’t matter if the stats say income went up 10% if they or their kids won’t be able to land that house they wanted, or can’t make that appointment with the doctor and instead have to see an NP, or worry about having to move to a more expensive metro to reduce income volatility.

For example your $1000 oled tv is better than your $1000 crt tv therefore you your purchasing power has gone up. Or your base truck now comes with nav therefore your truck can be 5k more and still be net neutral. The problem with this system is that in order to stay in the same price catagory on the index you continually need to move down the product tiers. So today’s lowest tier is a decade ago mid tier is 2 decades ago high end. Moving down like that makes you feel poorer because wealth is relative.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ...

Propaganda is very effective, and Americans are the most skillful propagandists in the world. Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.

That doesn't mean the teflon president isn't just now blatantly silencing the voices of the opposition (Kimmel and then a general warning) so he definitely wants a place in the competition.

What happened 50 years ago? Hart-Cellar was in 1965. The foreign-born population dipped below 5% in 1970. It’s 15% today. This had major political ramifications. Democrats were able to move to the right economically because they could substitute labor voters demanding structural reforms with recent immigrant voters who would be happy with relatively small handouts from the government, or even just visas for their extended family.

In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.