President Donald Trump’s expensive new visa requirements are killing rural schools.
Last fall, Trump announced that H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers would now cost $100,000, a staggering sum for workers and the U.S. employers sponsoring them. Previous fees were around $1,700 to $4,500.
Rural schools often rely on international educators, but it’s not like schools that are struggling to hire people are going to have a cool $100,000 per teacher to toss around.
There are more than 2,300 H-1B visa holders who currently work as educators in roughly 500 school districts across the country. Texas, North Carolina, and California employ the most, while Georgia, Alaska, Arizona, and Minnesota are also pretty high.
School districts had already shouldered around $15,000 to $20,000 in visa-related fees to sponsor a single teacher even before the hike was announced. Now, instead of having qualified teachers from overseas, schools will deal with shortages by hiring online teachers and uncertified teachers.
Terrific. Great job, Trump.
There’s no question that this is also decimating rural health care, which relies on a steady stream of international workers.
One hospital in rural North Dakota has been trying to hire a lab technician for months, with no U.S. citizens applying. The new visa fee is so steep that it amounts to what rural hospitals would pay for the annual salaries of two lab techs. So the hospital can’t hire anyone locally because they don’t exist, and it can’t hire anyone from overseas because it can’t afford them.
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And it’s not just the steep price tag. The administration is now requiring visa officers to screen for medical conditions and demand financial information to make sure that visa applicants have enough money to cover medical care for the rest of their lives.
Of course, the change to H-1B visas was done for racist reasons, based on a certainty that foreigners are taking jobs meant for Americans.
“Either the person is very valuable to the company and America, or they’re going to depart and the company is going to hire an American. If you’re going to train people, you are going to train an American,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said.
Somehow, this ridiculous price hike is intended both to keep foreigners out so they don’t take our jobs and to raise $100 billion. And somehow, it will do that even though the administration expects that the 85,000 visas normally awarded each year will significantly decrease.
Wait. Maybe that $100 billion is meant to also include the Trump Gold Card, where wealthy people can just straight up buy citizenship for $5 million—or maybe $1 million? Either way, people coming here to teach don’t have $1 million to drop on the world’s tackiest gold card.
Even if an international educator or health care professional managed to jump through all of these hoops, they’d end up in a rural area in a country where immigration agents routinely swoop in to kidnap people based on racist vibes.
Why would anyone put themselves through that?
