Are $100K H-1B Visas a Good Idea?

 

President Trump seems to think so.  The H-1B visa was intended to be used by foreigners wishing to work in the United States in "an occupation that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge" and typically requires a bachelors' degree or higher.  When President Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 creating the H-1B as we know it today, it established a quota of persons to be admitted and required that companies hiring such people fill out a Labor Condition Application, which showed that it was unusually hard to find such qualified individuals in the existing U. S. labor pool.

 

On the face of it, the H-1B visa sounds like a good idea.  If we are going to allow immigration at all (a question that is more debatable now than it has been in the past), it would make sense to choose those immigrants who are more capable of contributing to the economy in employment sectors where there are presently shortages. 

 

But there are always unintended consequences for any law, and lately there have been accusations that the H-1B system has been abused by companies simply wanting to hire cheaper foreign workers for jobs that they could fill with better-paid U. S. workers.

 

Evaluating the truth of that accusation is something I'm not personally prepared to do.  But the current H-1B visas are allocated largely by lottery, plus a nominal fee of a few hundred dollars, and a recent article in the Los Angeles Times indicates that companies have been gaming the lottery system by putting in multiple applications for the same person or position.  Authorities claim they have changed the rules to reduce such abuse.  But clearly there is room for improvement in the way the H-1B visa is administered.

 

President Trump's solution to these problems is to raise the annual fee for an H-1B visa holder to at least $100,000, with a variety of more expensive visas for which the main qualification is that you're already rich and can pay a million dollars or more.  Some statistics cited by the LA Times indicate that many H-1B visa holders may be earning as little as $60,000 a year, which is both an indication that the prevailing wages in the high-tech industry are not being paid as they should be for these visa holders, and that slapping a $100K surcharge on such visas will simply make most of them disappear, along with the current visa holders.

 

There are two main groups of stakeholders in this situation.  One group consists of high-tech U. S. firms wanting to hire the best workers at the lowest wages they can get by with.  Another group (or set of groups) are foreign workers who are qualified to do high-tech jobs, and would like to do them in the U. S.  Over 70% of H-1B visa holders are from India, it turns out, but there are other countries involved as well. 

 

Adam Smith's invisible hand would let these workers in at whatever wage they would accept, which would be way below the prevailing U. S. wage scale.  While Smith's rule about trade barriers (namely, the fewer the better) was intended for goods, not people, extending it to free immigration is in the spirit if not the letter of his ideas.  In the free-for-all of illegal immigration we have seen over the last few years before Trump came into office, high-tech companies have not benefited as much as they might have, because even with troops of lawyers at their disposal they would find it difficult to blatantly violate immigration law on a large scale, in contrast to the thousands of construction and other more menial jobs that most illegal immigrants find to do, at least at first. 

 

On the other extreme, you have people such as President Trump and my late friend Steve Unger, who was a classic "leftie" of the old school.  Two more different personalities can scarcely be imagined, but on this issue I think they would agree:  keep out them durn foreigners so that U. S. workers can make higher wages. 

 

If you take this principle to an extreme, we would halt all immigration of whatever kind, even for temporary student visas, which are a kind of back-door way that many well-qualified foreigners get here in the first place.  From personal experience, I can tell you that would be an unmitigated disaster for U. S. higher education, which depends on non-U. S. citizens for a large fraction of its students and ultimately professors, who have to start out as students.

 

Would wages for high-tech jobs and graduate students go up?  Perhaps some, but that assumes other things are equal, and after a while they wouldn't be.  It's easy to forget that the world's most important resource is people, not rare-earth minerals or oil or even water and air.  We are a nation of immigrants, and historically we have turned that into a unique strength by means of converting all kinds of immigrants to something called the American Way.

 

But if the American Way turns into something that people from other countries either can't afford, or can't buy into for some other reason, be it political, ethnic, or what have you, then the future of this country is dim.  We have had practically open borders with toleration of scofflaws for far too long, and it makes sense to reform the system so that the rule of law becomes more respected.  But it should be a rule of law, not a rule of men, or of one man.  And laws, or rules, that change with the whims of one energetic guy in the White House are hard to have respect for.

 

In sum, the hundred-thousand-dollar H-1B visa looks a lot like the tariff situation or the random roundups by masked ICE enforcers.  It's flashy, attracts a lot of attention and support from President Trump's base, but makes little logical sense in the greater scheme of things if you look at it from a practical view.  Not only the H-1B visa system, but the whole immigration process needs a major overhaul.  But in a republic, the ideas for the overhaul should originate with the public who is concerned, as well as stakeholders such as high-tech companies.  That's not being done, and until it is done, we can expect further chaos and distress among highly qualified people who are here to contribute to our economy and just want to better their lives. 

 

Sources:  The Los Angeles Times carried the article "India expresses concern about Trump's move to hike fees for H-1B visas" at https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-09-20/india-expresses-concern-about-trump-plan-to-hike-fees-on-h-1b-visas-that-bring-tech-workers-to-us on Sept. 20, 2025.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the H-1B visa

Cyber Command Gets a Promotion

On Friday, Aug. 18, President Trump announced that the Defense Department's U. S. Cyber Command would be elevated to the status of a "unified combatant command," joining the nine other commands such as the U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM) that oversees all military operations in the Middle East, and the U. S. Strategic Command in charge of nuclear weapons.  The heads of these commands are just below the Secretary of Defense in the chain of command, and each unified combatant command cuts across the traditional armed-services divisions of army, navy, and air force. 

According to a report at the website Politico, the promotion of the Cyber Command has been in the works for years, but carrying out this promotion is in line with the President's campaign promises to bolster the Cyber Command.  Currently that Command is headed by Admiral Mike Rogers, who also heads the National Security Administration (NSA).  The Senate must confirm a new Cyber Command leader before the reorganization is fully implemented, but no particular problems are expected on that score.

After taking an initial leadership position, the U. S. has appeared lately to be lagging in the recognition that cyberwarfare is no longer some science-fiction pipe dream.  The nature of cyberwarfare makes it difficult to state with certainty exactly who is responsible for what.  But most experts agree that, for example, Russia has been plaguing the Ukraine with cyberattacks of many kinds for the last few years, ranging from invading servers used by news media to causing widespread power blackouts in large cities such as Kiev in the middle of the winter.

Probably the first cyberattack that became widely known and has definite attribution was called Stuxnet.  Developed by the U. S. NSA, possibly with cooperation from Israel, it was a clever attack on Iran's uranium centrifuges in 2010 that caused numbers of them to self-destruct.  Stuxnet was the last major focused cyberattack we know of that the U. S. has committed, but by the nature of the business, there may be others we don't know about yet. 

In conventional warfare, the enemy is in a clearly defined geographical area, and even wears uniforms and puts insignia on their equipment so you can tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.  Alas, such formality is long gone in many battlefields, and in the anonymous world of cyberspace it is next to impossible to identify the source of an attack in terms of a physical location and which people are doing the bad stuff.  In this regard cyberwarfare borrows from the world of espionage the mysteries and guesswork that makes spy novels so interesting, and makes actual espionage work so frustrating. 

But just because the enemy can't always be clearly identified, that doesn't mean we can ignore what they can do.  There is an old saying that generals always prepare to fight the last war, meaning that military thinkers are slow to deal with combat innovations.  The elevation of the Cyber Command to a level equal to the Strategic Command says that, organizationally at least, we are taking the threat of cyberattacks and the damage they could cause at least as seriously as we are taking the threat of nuclear attacks, which are far less likely but have a higher potential for damage.

Or maybe not.  At any given time, there is probably a maximum amount of damage that a determined cyberattacker could do with the capabilities they have and the nature of the target.  One advantage that the U. S. has compared to smaller and more tightly organized countries is that we have a lot of diversity in our technical infrastructure.  For example, in the recent flap about Russia's attempt to sway U. S. elections, no one has found any convincing evidence that Russian hackers were able to manipulate electronic vote counting.  Even if they had wanted to, the hackers face the difficulty that votes are counted in literally thousands of different jurisdictions using a wide variety of systems.  Anybody wanting to mess with a voting district that was big enough to make a difference would probably have to have a spy physically present for some time in order to gather enough information to give a cyberattack even a chance of success.  Something of the same principle applies to our electric grid, which is a congeries of old and new technology with a bewildering variety of SCADA (supervisory, control, and data acquisition) systems.  Again, a determined cyberattacker would have to focus on one system that is particularly vulnerable and large enough to make a terrorist attack worthwhile in terms of headlines.

Despite these built-in defenses, the U. S. should not be complacent with regard to the possibility of a crippling cyberattack, and the promotion of the U. S. Cyber Command to the board of Unified Combatant Commands is a step in the right direction.  As I mentioned not long ago in a blog on ransomware, one of the U. S. government's primary responsibilities is to defend the nation against attacks, and this includes cyberattacks.  The spectacle of private companies, even small ones, getting held up for ransom by hackers is morally equivalent to a cross-border raid by physical invaders.  What would normally be a domestic police matter then becomes an international incident, and the intervention of the U. S. military would be appropriate in both cases.

But a lot is yet to be defined about the responsibilities of the military on the defense side.  Historically, the computer industry has held consumers responsible for cybersecurity to the extent of installing patches and upgrades promptly and following good cybersecurity "hygiene."  But as attacks become more sophisticated, there may have to be closer cooperation among private technology developers, their customers, and the military, which up to now has not had much input into the business except as a good customer. 

If history is any precedent, not much will change in a major way until a foreign cyberattack succeeds with a truly crippling blow that costs many billions of dollars, affects millions of people, or results in multiple deaths and injuries.  Then we will get serious about how the military can fight the next war—a cyberwar—and not the last one.

Sources:  Politico.com carried a story entitled " Trump elevates U.S. Cyber Command, vows 'increased resolve' against threats" on Aug. 18, 2017 at http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/18/trump-us-cyber-command-elevated-unified-combatant-command-241783.  I referred to an article in Wired Magazine published June 20, 2017 at https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-attack-ukraine/ and the Wikipedia article on Unified Combatant Command.  My blog on ransomware appeared on Mar. 27, 2017 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2017/03/ransomware-comes-to-heartland.html.