> “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 financially impossible for many districts to continue hiring the teachers their students depend on.

“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.

Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is not limited by annual caps or lotteries. You just apply (as a company) by filling in a few simple forms and posting a job in the "Canada Job Bank" for a period of time to demonstrate that you genuinely searched for locals to fill the role and couldn't find anyone suitable. I've hired many people through this program to fill a variety of roles over the years, and all of them eventually became citizens too. Once you're on Canadian soil as a TFW, moving toward permanent residency is not very difficult if you're a skilled worker with enough "points" (based on education, etc.).

Some argue (perhaps correctly) that the TFWP suppresses Canadian wages and productivity growth by flooding the labour market with cheap staff from poor countries. And there is likely some truth to that. But when I hear how many hoops my US colleagues have to jump through with lawyers and such to bring skilled employees in, it boggles my mind. If the Americans were to implement a more modern temporary foreign worker program similar to what Canada has, you'd have to imagine the US economy would boom like it never has.

1. Set a monthly quota (for argument's sake, 5000 a month).

2. Each month the government holds an auction, and businesses that believe they need to bring in foreign labour can bid for however many visas they want.

3. The highest bidding companies get the visas.

This way the government can control how many foreign workers come in to the country each year, and the economic rents from bringing in these foreign workers accrues to the public as additional government revenue, rather than as additional profit for corporations.

It also means that the limited number of available H1B visas are put towards their highest value use. The company that wants to bring in a highly skilled foreign worker that's worth $500,000 in additional profit to them will be willing to bid up to $499,999 for their visa. The company that wants to bring in another Tim Hortons worker won't be able to outbid them.

Education is an investment to the future generation and must not be overlooked.

Good. I’m totally fine with whiners self-selecting out of the state.

Also? I’ve worked in rural Alaska. It’s not nearly so bad as the people on here would say.

https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is...

> BOSTON, June 8 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday struck down a $100,000 fee U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, concluding that it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized.

> U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas, which tech companies in particular rely heavily on to bring on foreign workers.

It needs a couple things:

1. Break current gamification of lottery winners. Probably by requiring a greater diversity in country-of-origin of H1B visas granted annually. Probably involves some kind of % or per country cap. 2. Better wage protection for US workers in the minimum salary requirements. H1B is ostensibly to address skills gaps but is actually an sub-competitive wage scheme.

People talk about H1B visas solving certain problems but inevitably the problems it solves is keeping wages low. For instance, imagine if rural teachers were paid like tech workers or crab fishermen. The draw would pull from across the country. Like tech workers and crab fishermen.

How can you argue there aren't enough jobs, and support H1Bs to fill jobs?

I can see Alaska's case since encouraging people to move there very well may be a requirement, but surely there's somewhere between $0 and $100k that would convince someone to move there.

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...

That said, Trump's announcement has done lasting damage to tech hiring in the US because it's set a price floor for opening a GCC (Global Capacity Center), which subsidizes in the CEE (Central and Eastern EU States), Israel, and India can outcompete most of the US excluding the Bay and NYC where the preexisting ecosystem's network effect negates it's impact.