A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.
Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.
Pulling up my alma mater... https://www.openthebooks.com/wisconsin-state-employees/?Year...
The various roles that you'll find for software developers: Sr Is Specialist, Is Tech Srv Cons/Adm, Sr Inform Proc Conslt, Sr Systems Programmer
And you can pull up the pay scale at https://hr.wisc.edu/standard-job-descriptions/?job_group=Inf...
$80k/y isn't "we're paying H1-B half of what the going rate is" but rather "the state legislature has set this pay scale and we're paying everyone that amount" ... And many times, H-1B visas aren't eligible to work in those roles.
There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches
Trying to make state government competitive with Big Tech salaries (especially in states that aren't California) would not go over well with voters.
While private sector deals with layoffs and uncertainty, the public sector has things like "budget not good this year? Two weeks unpaid vacation for everyone" - https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/code/executive_orders/2003_... ... 401k matching? How about a fully funded pension instead. https://reason.org/commentary/the-wisconsin-retirement-syste...
Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.
It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bringing in cheap labor that can't leave.
Sadly I don't think we'll ever fix it either, right leaning industrialists support it because they benefit from cheap labor, and the left leaning politicians get to continue importing people who overwhelmingly vote for them. As usual the loser in the equation is the middle class American worker.
I don't think having an H1B helps you accelerate your citizenship application in anyway, and for many countries the wait for legal citizenship is decades long.
Just look at the data for how people vote by demographic group (race).
Nonwhite groups overwhelmingly vote blue, H1B's are overwhelmingly nonwhite. This is not controversial.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/aoodm8/how_the_...
Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.
Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.
There is plenty of data to back this up.
>A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage.
https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...
H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.
But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.
An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.
The cleaner approach is the immigrant has to pay that value in visa expenses, taxes, or something else; while the company should have to pay market rate for the position.
