Apple spends $500 billion per year to train Chinese employees including Chinese engineers. Why isn’t that money being spent in the US to help fix what is broken in our massively terrible public education system?
For those who think the executive order is a nothing burger, the illustrious Ilya Somin disagrees with you. In fact he thinks it will gut the H1B program. You can rest easy: mission accomplished.
He closes in part with this
“I don't claim the current H-1B system is ideal. But improving it would make the visas easier to get and more flexible”
Since there were folks who were saying that making a 200 yard shot with a scoped .308 was only within the realm of possibility for specially trained (((snipers))), I went to the range today. (Would have gone last weekend but I suspect that 60 mph gusts in a thunderstorm might have had a deleterious effect on my accuracy.) Here are the first two targets I shot, one to make sure the zero on the rifle hadn't drifted in the 6.5 years it had been since I went to the range the last time, and a second one to demonstrate it wasn't a fluke.
And when I figure out how to rotate it and make sure there's no metadata attached to it, I'll post video of me walking out to the target frame for the second one there to demonstrate that yes, it was at 200 yards.
Agree with others saying the $100k should be an annual fee and also that the H1B visa holder should have some skin in the game. Would also agree/suggest that the $100k be retro-active, with minimal carve-outs.
Not addressed in this EO (said EO needs Congress to step up) is the predilection of big tech firms to open 'centers of excellence' in foreign countries like Bangalore India, St. Petersberg, Russia, Brazil and other foreign countries.
When I was managing high-tech teams (EMC/Dell - 1990's-20 teens), the company had the CE's all over the globe. Cheap labor, sometimes qualified, no way to fire or hire the 'staff'. The company also had a bunch of H1B's. When Dell bought out EMC in the highest (then) tech buyout ever ($57B), my team was then off-shored, mostly to Bangalore. And I had my last RIF notice (so no empathy for the Fed workers crying).
Trump's EO does nothing to prevent these giant tech and other companies to go back to or, if already there, more heavily invest in the off-shore tech centers.
Trump did win office as a Republican you know. As P.J. O'Rourke put it years ago - the party that says government doesn't work and whenever they are in charge they prove it.
Having worked in IT for 25 years I have met very few Indians with good skills. They all say they have the skills and experience for any job but learn as they go and it's quite obvious slowly too. I was at a database product training live webunar last week. It was not working for everyone and a lot of them started spamming the chat angrily until the chat was shut down. It was a free training. The rudeness was off rhe charts
Someone more tolerant than me explained there is a huge desperation for people to leave India. I can understand this. Software development relies on trust and collaboration and our efforts to welcome and work with Indians in India wrr noy respected. We would tell them what to do. They would ignore us and do some other things and broke stuff. This was brutal and further complicated by social and religious hierarchies we didn't understand and were not really explained in the workplace (Microsoft and Accenture)
Since the 90's, tech companies have been abusing the system affecting hundreds of thousands of US workers laid off in preference of lower waged foreign workers. IT 'consulting' companies have made billions supplying the 'global' sourcing talent. Why has it taken 30 years for anything to happen? One word: money.
Trump really should have tailored the order more specifically to the tech sector. Not every field abuses the H-1B program, but they’re all subject to the same $100,000 fee.
Addendum: I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts making exceptions for other fields, or scraps the whole thing and replaces it with something more targeted.
The text is more encouraging than I expected, based on how flimsy the actual policy is. So at least the problem has been understood and articulated, even if this remedy is scarcely cosmetic.
I wonder what behind the scenes fights with the tech oligarchs led to this style over substance compromise?
The capitalist logic behind wage-dumping and over-saturating the labour-market with foreign workers is an iron law, and Trump would have lost his enitre support among the tech-hos* that jumped ship from Team Democrat's floundering Raft of Fools had he actually taken real measures.
It's a bit like the border-issue and importing Pedros to pick cotton or tomatoes or sending in the Guard to help ICE do its job.
It looked promising but was symbolic in order to please the base.
If he keeps this up, Vance will become a never-ran because after the Republicans lose majority in a few months, Trump will increasingly push blame towards anyone than himself.
And Vance will among the voters become associated with and administration that tried sleight of hand instead of doing what it promised.
News in 2028 is starting to look realistic, and I can give you a heads up from over here:
MSM has started to write about him, when they have cause to mention California, as the one who can "save USA from MAGA". Only feelers yet, nothing definite, but articles explaining who he is (only positive of course) and why he'd be the best choice.
My tin-foil senses are all a-tingle that it's the start of a concerted effort to make all the MSM sing hymnals to the glories of Saint Gavin the Saviour of the Republic.
I wonder if Trump himself understands that he is making the exact same mistakes now, as last time?
"The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million"
Who calculated those numbers??????? The annual cap for H1Bs is 85K, H1B visa is good for 6 years, so, if the cap is reached every year and no worker leaves, there should be 510,000 workers on H1B in 2019. With the cap exempts (like college professors), maybe, 600K tops. Total, not just STEM. Using historic cap numbers, in 2000 they would've had 490K H1Bs + exempts. Not millions.
Unless, they add apples to oranges, and include into "foreign STEM workers" (whatever "STEM", "foreign" and "workers" mean) other visas but never explain which ones. Interns in the WH need better STEM education to be able to add numbers and provide precise definitions. I don't know about the rest of the analysis, but this miscalculation doesn't create much trust to it.
Layoffs are currently everywhere in high tech. They say, if you're not doing AI, you're lucky to have any job at all.
Having said that, this fee is a patently stupid move, leading to potentially more abuse (both American and foreign workers) instead of fixing the H1B program. The visa was created as a protectionist program, where the employer is supposed to try hiring American workers first, and, if they can't find the skills, offer prevailing wage to foreign workers on par with how much they pay to domestic positions. But the program currently doesn't work as intended, in the recent years having developed into a lottery, where the only beneficiaries are big corporations hiring foreign workers in bulk and shady consulting companies hiring low wage foreign talent and renting them out. A possible fix might be putting quotas on the number of foreign workers a company can hire, both the absolute number and percentage of workforce.
The fee still wouldn't deter big corporations from hiring foreign workers in bulk and the consulting companies can require workers to work for very little money for a couple of years. But small startups and colleges, and anyone who requires rare skills (not all H1Bs are high tech) wouldn't have extra $100K laying around. And it would only create more abuse of other visa categories, like J1 and F1, by shady businesses.
You shouldn't "expect" anything from good analysis other than precise definitions and data. It's like, 50 trillion died from convid, PCR tests and other respiratory diseases.
All I see is extreme ignorance. Ignorance of data, immigration procedures, existing practices, on all levels. How to fix THAT?
The number of foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workers in the U.S. more than doubled between 2000 and 2019 to nearly 2.5 million, even as overall STEM employment only increased 44.5% during that time, it said.
I know what STEM stands for, my question was who they counted as technology or engineering. There are codes.
It downed on me, the analysis was generated by AI, the mistakes are very typical. Like, other fantastically sounding claims, "one company" replacing thousands of workers with H1Bs. You would think that the government isn't shy to use actual names of those companies.
Foreign-born STEM workers are defined as those STEM workers born outside of the United States who were not citizens by birth. In 2021, 17% of all civilian workers (26,546,400 people) and 19% of STEM workers were foreign born (7,023,900 people), according to the ACS (Table SLBR-25). Over a quarter (26%) of foreign-born workers employed in the United States worked in STEM occupations. There are three subsets for the foreign-born population: noncitizens who live in the United States on visas (temporary visa holders), those with permanent resident status (or Green Cards), and foreign-born workers who have become U.S. citizens (naturalized citizens).
So, the government can't name Intel and needs to call it "another IT firm", why is that? There were layoffs and restructuring in Silicon Valley (with engineers joking that they were laid off by AI, which is probably true), but gigantic "replacements"? None that I know of and what would be the purpose?
The layoffs seem to be the result of a tax code change in 2017:
"Foreign-born STEM workers", NOT "foreign STEM workers". It's like "gold-colored chain" and "gold chain" are all the same. Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk would be all foreign workers (and don't get me start about Hollywood). I thought that the issue was to fix the H1B program but never mind. Or, maybe, the issue is teaching AI better Math and reading comprehension.
My son owns a computer blockchain company overseas. He won’t hire American computer science grads because they aren’t good enough and have poor work ethics
No tax on overtime turned into, no, just not on the first $12,500, no tax on Soc Sec turned into, hey, we'll give you (back) $6K if you meet a certain threshold, deport them all has turned into, well we are getting quite a lot of felons that the bolsheviks released, and we get the random trial ballons of, we're going to give amnesty to.... , or we're going to import hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, to ... who knows what's next.
I'm all for throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, but is RINO Reince Priebus back whispering in his ear or what the actual F is going on?
Apple spends $500 billion per year to train Chinese employees including Chinese engineers. Why isn’t that money being spent in the US to help fix what is broken in our massively terrible public education system?
Breaking news!
For those who think the executive order is a nothing burger, the illustrious Ilya Somin disagrees with you. In fact he thinks it will gut the H1B program. You can rest easy: mission accomplished.
He closes in part with this
“I don't claim the current H-1B system is ideal. But improving it would make the visas easier to get and more flexible”
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/09/21/trumps-harmful-and-illegal-plan-to-gut-h-1b-visas-by-imposing-100000-fees/
Note : i disagree with Somin, both on this and on almost everything. He is generally correct on eminent domain but that’s about it.
Note 2 : I hate linking to the Emote blog (formerly Reason Magazine), but it’s worth it to pile some mockery on an emotional open borders fanatic.
Note 3 : always remember, the carbon they want to reduce is you.
Interesting article. We'll see how it plays out. Reason's always been super pro-open borders, though.
And as he (she?) mentions, the issue will see a courtroom or ten before it actually goes into meaningful effect.
Since there were folks who were saying that making a 200 yard shot with a scoped .308 was only within the realm of possibility for specially trained (((snipers))), I went to the range today. (Would have gone last weekend but I suspect that 60 mph gusts in a thunderstorm might have had a deleterious effect on my accuracy.) Here are the first two targets I shot, one to make sure the zero on the rifle hadn't drifted in the 6.5 years it had been since I went to the range the last time, and a second one to demonstrate it wasn't a fluke.
https://i.postimg.cc/2jcKzBrg/20250921-1.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/fTVgkTby/20250921-2.jpg
And when I figure out how to rotate it and make sure there's no metadata attached to it, I'll post video of me walking out to the target frame for the second one there to demonstrate that yes, it was at 200 yards.
Agree with others saying the $100k should be an annual fee and also that the H1B visa holder should have some skin in the game. Would also agree/suggest that the $100k be retro-active, with minimal carve-outs.
Not addressed in this EO (said EO needs Congress to step up) is the predilection of big tech firms to open 'centers of excellence' in foreign countries like Bangalore India, St. Petersberg, Russia, Brazil and other foreign countries.
When I was managing high-tech teams (EMC/Dell - 1990's-20 teens), the company had the CE's all over the globe. Cheap labor, sometimes qualified, no way to fire or hire the 'staff'. The company also had a bunch of H1B's. When Dell bought out EMC in the highest (then) tech buyout ever ($57B), my team was then off-shored, mostly to Bangalore. And I had my last RIF notice (so no empathy for the Fed workers crying).
Trump's EO does nothing to prevent these giant tech and other companies to go back to or, if already there, more heavily invest in the off-shore tech centers.
There’s an article in the NY Times today about abuses in the J-1 visa program
Trump did win office as a Republican you know. As P.J. O'Rourke put it years ago - the party that says government doesn't work and whenever they are in charge they prove it.
Having worked in IT for 25 years I have met very few Indians with good skills. They all say they have the skills and experience for any job but learn as they go and it's quite obvious slowly too. I was at a database product training live webunar last week. It was not working for everyone and a lot of them started spamming the chat angrily until the chat was shut down. It was a free training. The rudeness was off rhe charts
My personal experience has been much more mixed than yours.
Explain, please.
Someone more tolerant than me explained there is a huge desperation for people to leave India. I can understand this. Software development relies on trust and collaboration and our efforts to welcome and work with Indians in India wrr noy respected. We would tell them what to do. They would ignore us and do some other things and broke stuff. This was brutal and further complicated by social and religious hierarchies we didn't understand and were not really explained in the workplace (Microsoft and Accenture)
Experiences like yours are important in setting policy. Your experience isn’t unique.
My experiences have been different. This is also important in setting policy.
Have a nice day.
Seems like a passive-aggressive response, here.
Since the 90's, tech companies have been abusing the system affecting hundreds of thousands of US workers laid off in preference of lower waged foreign workers. IT 'consulting' companies have made billions supplying the 'global' sourcing talent. Why has it taken 30 years for anything to happen? One word: money.
6h
Trump really should have tailored the order more specifically to the tech sector. Not every field abuses the H-1B program, but they’re all subject to the same $100,000 fee.
Addendum: I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts making exceptions for other fields, or scraps the whole thing and replaces it with something more targeted.
I sure learned a lot at 6 am 🤬… yeppers Screaming into the Void, Sim
You're up early!
both of you!
No, I'm still up late.
The text is more encouraging than I expected, based on how flimsy the actual policy is. So at least the problem has been understood and articulated, even if this remedy is scarcely cosmetic.
I wonder what behind the scenes fights with the tech oligarchs led to this style over substance compromise?
The freakout could be heard around the globe.
The capitalist logic behind wage-dumping and over-saturating the labour-market with foreign workers is an iron law, and Trump would have lost his enitre support among the tech-hos* that jumped ship from Team Democrat's floundering Raft of Fools had he actually taken real measures.
It's a bit like the border-issue and importing Pedros to pick cotton or tomatoes or sending in the Guard to help ICE do its job.
It looked promising but was symbolic in order to please the base.
If he keeps this up, Vance will become a never-ran because after the Republicans lose majority in a few months, Trump will increasingly push blame towards anyone than himself.
And Vance will among the voters become associated with and administration that tried sleight of hand instead of doing what it promised.
News in 2028 is starting to look realistic, and I can give you a heads up from over here:
MSM has started to write about him, when they have cause to mention California, as the one who can "save USA from MAGA". Only feelers yet, nothing definite, but articles explaining who he is (only positive of course) and why he'd be the best choice.
My tin-foil senses are all a-tingle that it's the start of a concerted effort to make all the MSM sing hymnals to the glories of Saint Gavin the Saviour of the Republic.
I wonder if Trump himself understands that he is making the exact same mistakes now, as last time?
> I wonder if Trump himself understands that he is making the exact same mistakes now, as last time?
As much as I appreciate the guy, I'm not sure he's quite capable of grasping the concept of "Trump making mistakes".
"The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million"
Who calculated those numbers??????? The annual cap for H1Bs is 85K, H1B visa is good for 6 years, so, if the cap is reached every year and no worker leaves, there should be 510,000 workers on H1B in 2019. With the cap exempts (like college professors), maybe, 600K tops. Total, not just STEM. Using historic cap numbers, in 2000 they would've had 490K H1Bs + exempts. Not millions.
Annuals caps are taken from:
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/h1b-visa-program-fact-sheet/
Unless, they add apples to oranges, and include into "foreign STEM workers" (whatever "STEM", "foreign" and "workers" mean) other visas but never explain which ones. Interns in the WH need better STEM education to be able to add numbers and provide precise definitions. I don't know about the rest of the analysis, but this miscalculation doesn't create much trust to it.
Layoffs are currently everywhere in high tech. They say, if you're not doing AI, you're lucky to have any job at all.
Having said that, this fee is a patently stupid move, leading to potentially more abuse (both American and foreign workers) instead of fixing the H1B program. The visa was created as a protectionist program, where the employer is supposed to try hiring American workers first, and, if they can't find the skills, offer prevailing wage to foreign workers on par with how much they pay to domestic positions. But the program currently doesn't work as intended, in the recent years having developed into a lottery, where the only beneficiaries are big corporations hiring foreign workers in bulk and shady consulting companies hiring low wage foreign talent and renting them out. A possible fix might be putting quotas on the number of foreign workers a company can hire, both the absolute number and percentage of workforce.
The fee still wouldn't deter big corporations from hiring foreign workers in bulk and the consulting companies can require workers to work for very little money for a couple of years. But small startups and colleges, and anyone who requires rare skills (not all H1Bs are high tech) wouldn't have extra $100K laying around. And it would only create more abuse of other visa categories, like J1 and F1, by shady businesses.
The way it's worded, I would expect that the 2.5 million figure encompasses all visa types and perhaps even other categories.
What's ALL visa types, tourists?
You shouldn't "expect" anything from good analysis other than precise definitions and data. It's like, 50 trillion died from convid, PCR tests and other respiratory diseases.
All I see is extreme ignorance. Ignorance of data, immigration procedures, existing practices, on all levels. How to fix THAT?
The number of foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workers in the U.S. more than doubled between 2000 and 2019 to nearly 2.5 million, even as overall STEM employment only increased 44.5% during that time, it said.
------------
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20245/u-s-stem-workforce-size-growth-and-employment
I know what STEM stands for, my question was who they counted as technology or engineering. There are codes.
It downed on me, the analysis was generated by AI, the mistakes are very typical. Like, other fantastically sounding claims, "one company" replacing thousands of workers with H1Bs. You would think that the government isn't shy to use actual names of those companies.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I'm almost positive the company that laid off people in Oregon is Intel. Very big news around here.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20245/figure/LBR-13
Foreign-born STEM workers are defined as those STEM workers born outside of the United States who were not citizens by birth. In 2021, 17% of all civilian workers (26,546,400 people) and 19% of STEM workers were foreign born (7,023,900 people), according to the ACS (Table SLBR-25). Over a quarter (26%) of foreign-born workers employed in the United States worked in STEM occupations. There are three subsets for the foreign-born population: noncitizens who live in the United States on visas (temporary visa holders), those with permanent resident status (or Green Cards), and foreign-born workers who have become U.S. citizens (naturalized citizens).
So, the government can't name Intel and needs to call it "another IT firm", why is that? There were layoffs and restructuring in Silicon Valley (with engineers joking that they were laid off by AI, which is probably true), but gigantic "replacements"? None that I know of and what would be the purpose?
The layoffs seem to be the result of a tax code change in 2017:
https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502
"Foreign-born STEM workers", NOT "foreign STEM workers". It's like "gold-colored chain" and "gold chain" are all the same. Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk would be all foreign workers (and don't get me start about Hollywood). I thought that the issue was to fix the H1B program but never mind. Or, maybe, the issue is teaching AI better Math and reading comprehension.
I don’t see visa types in that document. Did I miss it?
No that's the definition of STEM workers. I assume foreign workers means all foreign workers.
Which makes it hard to use those numbers in a discussion of a change in h1-b policy.
My son owns a computer blockchain company overseas. He won’t hire American computer science grads because they aren’t good enough and have poor work ethics
WT actual F !?!
No tax on overtime turned into, no, just not on the first $12,500, no tax on Soc Sec turned into, hey, we'll give you (back) $6K if you meet a certain threshold, deport them all has turned into, well we are getting quite a lot of felons that the bolsheviks released, and we get the random trial ballons of, we're going to give amnesty to.... , or we're going to import hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, to ... who knows what's next.
I'm all for throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, but is RINO Reince Priebus back whispering in his ear or what the actual F is going on?