Thanks for replying…and not only that, at whatever entry level, visa holders typically will take less. After all, they don’t have insane student loans to pay back in order to subsidize Calcutta State’s DEI program.
"The $100,000 fee is a de facto tax on hiring skilled foreign workers in the U.S., and the transparent goal is to price them out of the market. Companies hire foreigners because
there aren’t enough Americans graduating from U.S. colleges with the right technical skills. International students account for 71% of the full-time graduate students
(who pay full tuition) in computer and information sciences.
Tesla filed 658 visa applications for manufacturing engineers in 2024, a skill set that isn’t taught at many elite U.S. colleges.
The order claims that companies abuse the H-1B program to hire cheap foreign workers who take the jobs of U.S.-born workers and suppress their wages. But
Congress has restricted H-1B visas to 85,000 a year, and demand has exceeded the quota for the last 20 years. Employers filed 442,000 applications this year, five times the limit, and a lottery is held each year to allocate the visas. Some 30,000 employers were approved last year for at least one new H-1B visa, which shows the broad demand.
There’s scant evidence that foreign workers are taking U.S. jobs. Between 2003 and 2024, U.S.-born employment in STEM occupations increased by three million, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. The unemployment rate for computer and math occupations was 3% and 1.4% for architecture and engineering last month, both lower than a year ago.
The White House ignores that employers are required to pay visa holders the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to comparable U.S. workers. So there’s no financial incentive to hire foreign workers. An analysis by Glassdoor found that
salaries for “foreign H-1B workers are about 2.8 percent higher than comparable U.S. salaries” (I.e., not lower wages.) on the job-search platform.
As for DHS’s lottery proposal, wealthy companies that can afford to pay foreign workers more will be at an advantage over startups.
If companies aren’t allowed to hire foreign workers in the U.S. because they are too expensive, they’ll go abroad. There will be fewer startups and less innovation. This will not help the U.S. in the AI race with China."
There's a 164M employed people in the US. 85K is 0.05% !! of that total. Pretty dam small.
