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

IMO, the fee is the wrong thing that needs adjusting. It's the salary that should be adjusted. The minimum salary for an H1B should be $200k. It's something like 50k right now which is ridiculous especially with all the restrictions an applicant is under. It both suppresses wages and abuses the worker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Reddit and internet forums have a bias for negative anecdotes.