Florida public universities to pause hiring new H-1B workers

https://www.wusf.org/education/2026-03-03/hiring-h1b-workers-florida-public-universities-pause-end-of-year

by rawgabbit • 5 months ago

55 75 5 months ago

rayiner6• 5 months ago

The labor market for recent college graduates is very soft right now, so it seems like a good time for a pause on importing foreign workers: https://www.investopedia.com/workers-who-attended-college-ar...

pavel_lishin5• 5 months ago

I have a friend whose university in Florida is trying to hire a professor for a specific field; they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically. Only two candidates showed up, and both were apparently terrible, and not a good fit for a teaching position.

A recent college grad may not be able to actually do the work that these universities are looking for.

gedy• 5 months ago

Only two candidates showed up

Untenured position in Florida - I'm guessing the pay was not great, no?

rayiner6• 5 months ago

Yet you can throw a rock and hit ten candidates for doctrinal STEM programs. I have no doubt that there are needs in specific areas. But that’s why the process described in the article permits exceptions.

In theory, you could trust USCIS to identify areas that have real need. But that process hasn’t been reliable in decades: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-anoth... (“Salzman spoke of the latest data on STEM graduates and jobs, reiterating that STEM programs turn out at least 50 percent more IT graduates every year than there are U.S. job openings. He also said that if the H-1B program is ramped up to the numbers that are being advocated (up from 85 000 to 185 000), that worker oversupply could possibly increase to the 90 percent mark or more.”). Note this article was written before the impacts of AI, etc., started being felt. So things are even worse now.

stackskipton• 5 months ago

they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically.

Part of this is we broke the pipelines in United States to domestically produce such talent. Foreign student visas made these jobs extremely unattractive for domestic students with options because of low pay + debt load while making them extremely attractive to foreign students because until recently, many people around the world were willing to do whatever for US visa.

light_hue_1• 5 months ago

You're leaving out what happened in Florida.

First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.

Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.

So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.

Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.

toomuchtodo5• 5 months ago

Pay more. They will find someone at the right price. They are unwilling to find someone at the pay on offer.

We should stop listening to institutions (corporate or academic alike) demanding quality at the lowest compensation bound possible, leveraging visas for labor to accomplish this. Pay the talent, develop the talent, or go without the talent.

doug_durham• 5 months ago

It really depends upon the positions you're hiring for. For professors, you are looking at talent at the long tail. Top people in a particular field will be randomly distributed across the globe. The restriction that Florida is putting on universities means that they cannot go after top talent for professorships or researchers if they aren't in the United States. That's a problem. We want them here teaching our students. We want them making their research contributions here where we can profit from it.

hypeatei• 5 months ago

Trump disagrees with you: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5601588-trump-h1...

The host interjected, “Well, we have plenty of talented people here.”

“No, you don’t,” the president replied. “No, you don’t have certain talents and people have to learn.”

booleandilemma• 5 months ago

Great news. We need this in all companies as soon as possible. American jobs for Americans.

testbjjl7• 5 months ago

Born in San Francisco at Mt. Zion, now Zuckerberg Chan, to parents and grandparents born in Berkeley. What have immigrants ever contributed… looks around… oh.

Why stop at nationality. California for Californians! Pretty bad take.

jvandreae• 5 months ago

We don't want any more immigrants, and we don't care whether they contribute or not.

itqwertz2• 5 months ago

A nice relocation package to a sunny climate would be pretty attractive to many qualified U.S. residents in the northern states.

Why are universities not creating a talent pool for their self-sustainment? Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.

They say, "those who can, do - those who can't, teach", and I believe it. Maybe the real question is: Are universities going the way of the physical newspaper, the personal blog, the dinosaur...?

testbjjl7• 5 months ago

Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.

So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?

Spivak2• 5 months ago

What year is this comment from? Having an undergrad college degree has been a near worthless credential in tech for at least a decade.

toomuchtodo5• 5 months ago

The credential is of questionable value, it’s a checkbox to enable international folks to buy their way in via educational visas and to soak US students for student loan debt that can’t be discharged. It’s gating economic outcomes, not an objective measure.

itqwertz2• 5 months ago

credentials required

There are no credentials required.

authoritatively say

Experience beats credentials.

qualified labor pool

No degree required outside of a HR checklist. CS students are not necessarily qualified outside of academia in the real world. H-1B just means you jumped through the hoops of credentialism to be a "qualified" candidate. Many universities require you to have a CS degree to work as an tech employee, so they shut out many qualified candidates. Their loss, and eventual downfall.

Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?

Yes, extremely overrated. The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt. The practices are on their way to automation. The hard work has been done.

pavel_lishin5• 5 months ago

A nice relocation package to a sunny climate would be pretty attractive to many qualified U.S. residents in the northern states.

The weather-climate might be nice, but the political climate is less so.

And frankly, depending on the time of year and where you are in Florida, the weather climate is atrocious, too.

and near-incomprehensible accents.

Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?

happytoexplain5• 5 months ago

Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?

How did you make this jump?

UncleMeat• 5 months ago

Florida has passed a ton of legislation attacking professors. Academics aren't terribly excited to move to a state where leadership sees them as an enemy.

dmix4• 5 months ago

"The H-1B has long been abused by IT outsourcing firms sponsoring middle skill workers for underwhelming pay," said O'Brien, "Unfortunately, the proposal, as currently written, would go much further than trimming back the questionable uses of the visa at state schools."

This is a fair take but maybe a pause is just a pause. Considering how big of problem visa abuse is in education in multiple countries, these organizations taking a break to review things and start to take it seriously is probably a good thing.

JohnTHaller2• 5 months ago

Giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt is nearly always a losing proposition

dmix4• 5 months ago

This is a popular issue in Canada, Australia, and Europe too. There's obviously some need for reform. You just can ask people who work at these institutions. Not everything is an American republican-bad thing.

frenchl• 5 months ago

I couldn't agree more!

xyzelement• 5 months ago

I've noticed an interesting trend in various groups that I am in. People are generally anti-right-wing but tend to agree with them in areas that actually affect their lives. This story is an example of that - us in tech are plenty familiar with H1Bs, both in terms of the "talent" that it tends to bring in, and impact on the American workforce. So we know this is right. A different demographic is for example my black friends who are obviously not right-wing, except they are sick of migrants camping out in their parks and school gyms. Or my persian friends that don't love trump but are over the moon about what's going on right now.

I don't know what to make of that, it's like we are left wing in theory but right wing in practice.

fred_is_fred• 5 months ago

Hiring more H1Bs is actually a right-wing position, not a left-wing one. It helps reduce overall wages.

brandonmenc• 5 months ago

It’s an elite position.

I’ve never seen a MAGA hat arguing for more (or any) H1Bs - quite the opposite.

happytoexplain5• 5 months ago

But in the rich-poor left-right quad, only one square is strongly against importing workers, and it's on the right side. Even just looking at the right side though - it really feels like the non-rich right's opinion on this is louder than the rich right's opinion (though, of course, it is money, not volume, that directs both parties in most cases).

ozozozd2• 5 months ago

It sure reduced salaries for tech workers where most H1Bs went to work, didn’t it? Are you arguing we didn’t bring enough H1Bs? Are we holding it wrong?

happytoexplain5• 5 months ago

You're observing the gradient between idealism and realism. It can look like hypocrisy, but people simply have multiple opinions. It says a lot that we are surprised when a person doesn't fall almost 100% on one side of the party line, because that crazy state is what we're used to.

It's just plain human to support outcomes that benefit one's self, family, friends, or community (especially if they are suffering, or losing what they were once afforded by their country or ancestors); even if you might have voted the other way if you were observing from outside, where you have the luxury to make more neutral decisions based on the big picture and long timeline.

As long as the delta isn't too gross, of course - there's where the subjectivity really comes in (How much benefit? How much harm? What does it mean to "deserve" something? Where is the line between simply deciding how your own country operates and harming others unnecessarily?)

asdff• 5 months ago

A lot of right wing rhetoric plays into basic human tribalistic tendencies. That is what makes it so attractive to a subset of highly tribal people. And most all people do show some tribalism to a degree.

That being said it isn’t like these people are necessarily aligned on any other issues. What might your Black or Persian friends think of gay people for example?

zzleeper2• 5 months ago

Wow. The amount of quasi-xenophobic comments in this tread is nuts. They are also a bit misguided.

You don't hire a professor at a R1 school just to teach math101. You hire them they can build a research lab or otherwise help to advance the frontier of the field (cancer, stats, etc.). The talent pool in several of these fields is very very small for Americans, because the brightest just go (used to go?) to work to finance or tech. So if you say you can't bring any bright foreigners, you are constraining yourself to a lower talent pool than other countries, and thus will pay a price (in less research, in no foreign students applying and thus no $$ from them, etc etc)

maldev• 5 months ago

There's different visa's for gifted people to come into the US. The H1B is not intended for this purpose you claim. The brightest won't be affected by this.

zzleeper2• 5 months ago

If you are in early career (i.e. graduated your PhD within the last 5 years) you are extremely unlikely to get the gifted people visa. The standard approach is to just get the H1B (not the lottery stuff for tech companies but the non-lottery one for hiring faculty at universities). Ask any foreign MIT professor hired early in his career and they went through H1B (and later on, they are more reluctant to move into a place like Florida..)

ozozozd2• 5 months ago

So obvious no one read before commenting.

According to a records request obtained by IFP, O'Brien said at least 315 of the 1,300 H-1B petitions approved between 2017 and 2022 were for physicians, PhD scientists or STEM faculty.

Yeah, we don’t want no stinkin doctors. Our healthcare is cheap as it is. /s

Florida public universities to pause hiring new H-1B workers

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