Xenophobia and Trump’s Latest Visa Move
Ramping up the H-1B fees is not a good idea.
So, here’s a question: would baseball, and America, be better off if Shohei Otani had stayed in Japan? I mean, isn’t he taking a job that an American could be doing? Indeed, about a quarter of MLB players were born outside the US. Will no one think of the jobs for real Americans?
Poor Ken Jennings had to wait for the Canadian who had the job before him to die before he got an opportunity to host Jeopardy!
And I am sure that the American spaceflight program would have eventually gotten its act together if Werner Von Braun had been denied a visa so that an American could have gotten that job.
Think about how many foreigners are taking acting, sports, teaching, and scientific jobs away from native born Americans! How many jobs have the Skarsgård family alone taken? Pedro Pascal stars in just about everything!
What is this silly rant about? Well, the Trump administration’s ongoing xenophobia.
Here’s the latest from the AP: Trump signs proclamation adding $100K annual fee for H-1B visa applications.
President Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation that will require a $100,000 annual visa fee for highly-skilled foreign workers and rolled out a $1 million “gold card” visa as a pathway to U.S. citizenship for wealthy individuals, moves that face near-certain legal challenges amid widespread criticism he is sidestepping Congress.
If the moves survive legal muster, they will deliver staggering price increases. The visa fee for skilled workers would jump from $215.
Now, I think that the legal challenges will come, and quite frankly, this is surely Congress’s realm, but I am to the point that until SCOTUS rules, I am not convinced that the courts will stop Trump in any substantive way.
Doug Rand, a senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, said the proposed fee increase was “ludicrously lawless.”
“This isn’t real policy — it’s fan service for immigration restrictionists,” Rand said. “Trump gets his headlines, and inflicts a jolt of panic, and doesn’t care whether this survives first contact with the courts.”
Hopefully so.
I have some direct experience in this area, as when I was a college dean, I was directly involved in the hiring process. One aspect of recruiting faculty is that there is a large number of foreign-born applicants in a given pool. In some fields (computer science comes to mind), the qualified applicants may all be foreign-born persons who need a visa to work in the United States. It was always a relief to find out if an obviously foreign-born applicant had a green card. It made hiring easier and less expensive.
(Side note: one of my first mini-crises as dean was heading into my first Fall semester and being told at the 11th hour that one of the chemistry lecturers still didn’t have their H-1B renewal and that if it didn’t come through, he wouldn’t be allowed to work. Luckily, we got the renewal in the nick of time, else there would have been some serious scrambling to cover a number of lectures and labs!)
And while, yes, STEM fields had a lot of foreign-born applicants, in my time there were applicants and hires in the social sciences who fell in the same category, in terms of visa needs.
One might respond to this by saying that the lack of native-born applicants makes the point of the nativists, i.e, that we aren’t training enough domestic folks to do these jobs. Even if one takes that point seriously, if school A needs a CS professor right now to help train domestic students who might one day pursue a doctorate in the field, then stopping school A from hiring a foreign-born professor when you have no native-borns in the pool kind of undercuts your goals.
While we can debate whether there aren’t enough domestic students in certain fields, simply blocking the ability of American institutions to hire foreign-born applicants won’t fix that problem.
Such myopia also ignores why it might be the case that relatively small, regional schools might find themselves with a number of foreign applicants. We are talking here about highly competitive fields. Computer Science, to pick the one that looms the largest in my mind, is a field in which there is a lot of draw from private industry and where pretty much every school in the country is recruiting.
Given that our university was in a small town of ~13k in a county of ~30k, about an hour from an unglamorous mid-sized city in a state that a lot of people look down on, recruiting faculty in highly competitive fields was never an easy task. As such, the fact that we were able to provide a visa pathway to non-citizens meant that we got highly qualified applicants who might otherwise not have been interested in living in rural Alabama.
A small, relatively unknown school will get a disproportionate number of often high-quality foreign applicants because of the visa. Let’s say I just earned a Ph.D. in CS from a good school, and I want to work in the US. My willingness to work even for regional schools in places I have never heard of is even higher than the normal Ph.D.’s willingness to do so (which is already high, I would note, just less so in specialized STEM fields that also have industry jobs available).
The ability to use H-1B visas to hire faculty who are neither citizens nor green card holders is a massive boon to such schools (and to universities in general, as well as industry). Taking those people will not mean that the native-born will get them. It will mean that the positions won’t be filled.
Universities like the one I worked for are not going to fork over $100k as an additional fee to hire an Assistant Professor (and the applicants aren’t going to be able to pay that fee–and if they can, they are unlikely to be applying to Directional Regional U).
I am focusing here on something I know quite well, but the logic applies to other areas and industries. Making it harder to hire the foreign-born is a self-own that makes it harder for America, writ large, to attract talent.
One of the stunningly stupid things about the MAGA approach to these things is that one of the ways that America has been great is that it attracts talent from all over the world.
If we are going to talk pure power and greatness in that sense, then surely we should want as much of the world’s talent here on our shores, working with our economy, not being shut out.
But, of course, if MAGA is really MAWA (make America whiter again), then it all makes sense.
Back to baseball, a truly great America is the Big Leagues in every area: sports, entertainment, science, industry, and education. Bringing the best of the best to the table should be the goal, but clearly, it is not for this administration.
In case anyone is missing my point: I am aware that an MLB team will gladly pay the fee to import the next Otani. What I am noting are high-profile examples where it should be obvious that attracting talent from around the world is a net good. If it is true about baseball, which it is, it is true about industry and higher ed.
This is just an example of ideological preferences leading to shooting ourselves in the collective foot.
********************@
Ha! Was just going to post something about this in the forum. This is…
1. A huge FU to the tech industry…And other sectors, as you say. But especially the tech industry. Off-shoring work is still an option, so it’s likely no one will be hired in the US to fill a job that might have been taken by an H-1B worker.
2. In the US, to this point, we didn’t have proclamations as a substitute for legislation. The word “proclamation” has a monarchical ring, or maybe a klaxon. The idea that this has to go to court to be stopped just shows how debased our political system has become.
I’ll dig up the link later. Several posts on Bluesky have the text of the (illegal) order, and a part states the fees can be waived if the secretary of homeland security determines, at their discretion, such immigrants’ presence is in the national interest and pose no threat to national security.
So it’s not just a FU to the tech bros, but also an opportunity to beg and grovel at the posterior of the orange ass.
@Kingdaddy:
Sure, all the bad unintended consequences look bad if you point them out.
I am sympathetic to the idea that corporations have abused the H1B system to just hire cheaper labor. That said, my network experienced very rapid, pretty successful growth. I had to hire a lot of new people. We are in an OK area of the country but not highly desirable. Because we were the network on the wrong side of the tracks we couldn’t offer contracts quite as generous as our competition. Pay was still good and we offered other advantages like more autonomy but its really regional location and pay that initially gain interest.
Since we needed so many people we ended up hiring H1Bs for the first time. We turned down truly awful American candidates but after hiring exclusively from top 20 programs we hired from other programs. However, we just didnt get enough applicants for our needs without adding in the H1B people. This proposal would not mean I would hire more Americans for my staff as they haven’t been available. It would only mean we would pay more money for the people we hire.
Steve
This, like making it almost impossible (and undesirable) for foreign students to come here to study, particularly at elite universities, seems to be fueled by the utter delusion that if “we” could just keep “them” out, Americans* would have these spots.
LOL. Nope. The jobs will follow the talent. Instead of having H1B visa applicants work here, US companies will find a way to get that work BY THOSE WHO ARE ABLE TO DO IT, another way.
* I will note that with girls doing better than boys in high school and college prep classes, what could end up happening is more women would be accepted to elite colleges.
It should be noted that this is–in tech forums, by tech workers across the political spectrum–being hailed as a good thing. Silicon Valley workers are (from every discussion I’ve seen) quite vehemently opposed to H1B visas, and constantly complain that “Indians are taking our jobs!” These are people who, in other discussions, are very much left/liberal/Democratic.
I’m all for opening the borders as much as possible, and making it as simple as possible for people to become US citizens (with reasonable screening). Immigrants are the heart of our nation. I’m the grandson of two (who almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to immigrate today).
A quick glance at a technical field at a high prestige institution, cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic, shows a substantial proportion of non-white guy names. https://www.mayoclinic.org/departments-centers/cardiovascular-medicine/sections/doctors/drc-20122704?locations=Rochester%2c%20MN#9f586ff3a6124d46a257480316484847
Many important medical positions in the US are staffed by the foreign born. You don’t need to look for baseball players to find big roles filled by the foreign born. I don’t know the high tech industries; I used a slide rule in college.
@Mu Yixiao:
You remind me of something I’ve been meaning to throw into the discussion. There’s a lot of controversy about how much immigrants do or don’t take American jobs. If they do take jobs, they take them from lower working class Blacks and Hispanics, the very people I keep being told shifted to Trump in the last election. If being MAGA is all about feeling economically insecure, they are the people most entitled to feel insecure.
Let me add that Thursday we had a lawn crew trimming our hedge and other stuff. Meanwhile, we’re having a fiber optic line installed and a couple guys were there at the same time to lay the cable in the yard. The yard guys spoke Spanish, one guy had enough broken English to ask how tall we want the hedge. The cable guys spoke Ukrainian, Russian, or something similar and we’re depending on a translate app. The guy who came Friday to complete the cable install had much better, but still very difficult English. I would guess Hindi as a native tongue. Without immigrants, both jobs would probably be scheduled for next summer.
@Mu Yixiao:
This is not a surprise even in the slightest.
If I decide to get another job, then being $100k a year cheaper than a lot of my competition, and not having that $100k come out of my pocket really is an advantage. It’s a terrible idea for the country, but it would be good for me personally.
And there’s a huge “libertarian” streak in tech spaces, where “libertarian” is actually just boring right wing ideology except they don’t hate gays, just poor people, immigrants, women and all notions of community. Hustle culture and social Darwinism more than anything approaching libertarianism.
I do like, however, that the Tech Moguls who went to Trump’s inaugural, gave money, and preemptively bent the knee to authoritarianism are getting screwed over. That warms my withered little heart. There is no way to get on a fascist’s good side, because fascists don’t have a good side. Ha! Take that, Tim Cook!
The introduction to Phil Och’s song “Love Me, I’m A Liberal”
I’m not one of those people who makes a big distinction between leftists and liberals, but Phil Ochs absolutely nailed this. The whole song is fun, if a little dated, and Ochs was right about a lot of things.
He probably wasn’t right about the CIA assassinating him and replacing him with a body double named John Butler Train though. That was a “psychotic break from reality.”
Goes to show there are problems on both sides of the leftist/liberal divide.
I don’t know if that had a point, I just love Phil Ochs.
@Mu Yixiao:
I’m kind of opposed to the longer-term work visas like H1B. I don’t want guest workers, I want Americans.
The foreign workers I’ve dealt with have mostly been great people. Certainly no worse than the Americans. There have been some where I cannot understand a thing they say, but that’s a me problem (which has led to the deeply uncomfortable for everyone “I’m a little hard of hearing, and really bad with accents… can someone repeat what he just said. I’m so sorry”)
I also don’t like that the visas are tied to the jobs (that’s what is driving down wages the most — cutting worker mobility so employers don’t have to compete to keep them).
I’m looking forward, in an odd sort of way, to listening to the techbros explain how they can manage Indian workers working from India but American employees have to return-to-office.
Albert Einstein.
Enrico Fermi.
John Von Neumann.
End of discussion.
color me cynical, but with the out of “unless the sec homeland security says it’s ok to wave the $100k fee” rule seems tailor made for companies to make a $75k donation to Trump and save $25k in expenses
@Gustopher:
FWIW, in my experience, H1Bs become green cards and often become naturalized citizens.
I think it is one of the few actual pathways to citizenship.
Well, I’m a retired Silicon Valley worker, and the H1B visas have always seemed a bit questionable. However, I never heard anybody complain “they are taking our jobs!”. Maybe it’s new? But I doubt it. The foreign workers I worked alongside of were very good. The US born workers I worked alongside were very good, too, but there weren’t enough of them.
And it was always stated and understood that the hiring company had to make a strong case that they could not find any US workers to fill the job. Yeah, maybe they fudged that, I have no way of knowing, but I doubt that there are many people who do.
Because we live in a country that kind of hates science in general, and really hates math. But you can’t be good at what we do while being bad at math. Meanwhile, the Chinese and the Indians live in a culture that worships math. Maybe too much, it’s hard to say.
Meanwhile, there was always this suspicion that the H1B workers were being exploited. Underpaid, and keeping their heads down.
In the end, I’m kind of neutral on them, but it is definitely a kick in the butt for the Silicon Valley types. All that sucking up to Trump hasn’t done much for ya, has it, Mark? Tim, I’m looking at you, too.
The aspect of this affair that struck me was the lack of notice. Apparently the executive order was ambiguous, and firms with H-1B employees overseas at the moment have been frantically telling them to get back to America right now before the order comes into effect on Sunday. They’re also instructing visa holders who are in the US to cancel any planned overseas travel. Meanwhile the White House has been trying to clean up the mess, declaring the order will only apply to future visa applications, not existing holders.
The White House said it will be a one-off fee. Lutnick said it will be levied annually. Confusion and incompetence reign, as is usual for this regime which likes to govern via Truth Social post.
@steve222:
If you pay Americans enough, they will move to where you are. Companies generally do not use h1b visas because they cannot hire Americans for a job, they hire them to save money. I have worked with many h1b people and all of them were being paid much less thanI was, and I work cheap. “Still pretty good pay” does not meet the standard. The poster child for this was around 10-15 years ago, Disney , to save much money a year, suddenly fired most or all of their IT department, then required the highly qualified team they fired to train the new guys to get any severance package. The law requires that the H1B visa holders be paid a competitive rate. That means you pay them what it would take to attract Americans, or you relocate where you can find the people you need. “Pay was still good” does not meet the requirements of the program.
The second element of this is that the H1B visa is a form of indentured servitude. These people often work at sub standard wages as a path to a green card. The process takes years, and if you change jobs, you start over. The employers often place unfair conditions on continued employment and the employee must comply. Imagine that you are 4 years into a 5-7 year process, and your employer decides that everyone must work 70 hour weeks including required work 7 days a week. I have had to do much worse, but I was free to leave, and that work schedule did not last long. I remember only one H1B visa holder in my acquaintance who left his position voluntarily.
All that is needed to fix the H1B problem is to enforce the law as it was intended and remove the whip that binds the employees to a specific employer.
If you don’t agree, prove me wrong!