Likely a bigger issue is that very few people want to live in a town of 3000 people or less that isn't connected to the interstate road system. Money can only do so much to fix that.
I think there's an important difference between importing labor to undercut qualified americans in a populated area versus importing labor to do a job that the vast majority of qualified americans will have no interest in at any reasonable pay rate.
China has already mostly made emigration illegal. The rest of the world will follow.
Genuinely news to me. Do you have any sources?
But here's one source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/02/18/china-right-leave-countr...
Other countries don't let you in without a passport. Even in the absence of a Chinese law, an airline would deny you boarding if you didn't have a passport.
In any case Houkou doesn’t prevent a person from leaving the country. A passport does, but this is the same in all countries.
> You see, it was always illegal to go outside of the country without Xi's approval and those approvals have mostly stopped coming.
There are hundreds of millions of trips out of China every year. A good number of them to the US for work. That fact is hard to square with what you’re saying.
There's an old Soviet joke: it's allowed! It's just that you haven't submitted your request, in triplicate, in our office in Siberia, open from 24:00 to 24:01 on Februari 30th every year! But it's allowed, with the proper permission. Just go get it!
Herein lies the whole problem. It is the potential employees who determine what a reasonable pay rate is, not the employer - the cat decides what kind of milk it likes.
Which, allow me to translate, means in less than 25 years there will not be any society worldwide that has the people to allow Emigration. As stupid as it sounds now, Iran, China, the Taliban (just an example) are 15 years away from outlawing emigration, and Germany less than that. China is mostly there, btw, but apparently able to keep that little extra authoritarian detail out of the news.
You're a farmer in China? There's NO way out. You can't go to the city, you can't leave the country. No way out whatsoever, except perhaps death. And the question "how is that different from slavery?" will be fought, not answered, by Chinese authorities. As I said, pay attention, because the 2 presidents down the US president, whoever it is by then, will make the same arguments (Yes, I get that there were worse slavery systems, like the African slave trade, than that. But it's still slavery)
That means in less than a generation any American town WILL be forced to dedicate their own population to everything they need done.
Iran and Afghanistan are almost as laughable. When I was in Syria I met an Iranian guy with one eye that travelled through the Kurdish mountains into Iraq and then Syria. Iran doesn't even control the mountain passes out of the country, they're literally controlled by Kurdish rebels who have very little concept of immigration controls other than pay me a dollar.
That being said, there are not that many saturation divers, because being a month in a bubble is kind of least problem with it. The lifelong health impact is.
This might be the opposite of living in Alaska where you share a really huge amount of space with not a lot of other people.
Your formulation isn't wrong, however it covers only one scenario. What happens when the locality cannot afford the cost to attract people to their region?
This is not even theoretical, its what happened to the rest of the world, as their best and brightest immigrated to America or Europe.
You could say "them's the breaks" and I would understand. However people vote for solutions, so how would you cover the worst case scenario?
It is also possible we will simply not teach these children (or build infrastructure, grow labor intensive crop, ect).
But are they? Or are they just willing and here for the money and foot in the immigration door? Sincere question, though I have negative views of the whole H1B thing in general (not a US national, though).
1) Why is that the dichotomy?
2) Do you say the same thing about well-paid oilfield workers living in RVs, away from their families and social networks?
3) Do you think the foreign workers are happy to be in Alaska for the sake of the Alaskan experience?
For some reason, people are convinced that teacher salaries have to be suppressed, lest the "wrong people" take the jobs. As if stressing about making rent is a critical signal of virtue, exclusively for teaching.
2) Pay alone can’t make people happy, which is why there’s a very high alcoholism/suicide rate among oil workers, despite it typically being a more temporary gig than teaching and paying considerably more. I also hold teachers to a different standard for on-the-job demeanor than oil workers.
3) Per my brother in law, they’re happy to be in Alaska for the American experience.
4) Foreign teachers in Alaska aren’t suppressing wages. That would be true for free market jobs where schools can simply decide not to teach students if it’s not profitable, but teaching isn’t like that.
2) Pay attracts workers. "Happiness" is a separate and personal issue.
3) Anecdata.
4) The fact is that far higher wages would attract American teachers for short periods. It is a free market, until exploitable labor is introduced. Foreign teachers absolutely are suppressing wages, as evidenced by the fact that the wages aren't high enough to attract American teachers.
The alternative isn't that rural communities get doctors born in the US, it's that they get no doctors.
I can understand why rural schools would need H1Bs. They would probably need to pay a premium to attract teachers from out of state, not to mention Alaska. And rural schools are the least able to actually do that.
Maybe if the current admin really wants to keep the $100k fee, they can extend an olive branch by either waiving the fee or helping to fund American teachers to move to fill those jobs.