13 views

Sept. 23, 2025, 4:00 PM EDTBy Daniella Silva, Rob Wile and Nicole AcevedoAfter announcing a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed overhauling the visa’s lottery selection process to prioritize higher-paid and higher-skilled foreign employees.The proposed policy changes could reignite the debate over the use of foreign labor by U.S. employers. The move comes as President Donald Trump has taken aim at H-1B visas, a program used widely by Big Tech and outsourcing companies to hire foreign workers, announcing Friday that companies would be required to pay a $100,000 fee with new applications submitted after Sept. 21. The administration on Tuesday targeted H-1B visa allocation, proposing a “weighted selection process” for when annual demand for the visas tops the 85,000 limit set by Congress, which it says has happened every year for more than a decade. The new process would replace the current lottery system that determines who gets to apply for those limited visa spots in favor of putting more weight on higher skilled and higher paid foreign workers, according to a proposed rule set to be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday. Under the current lottery rules, offers to apply for an H-1B visa are assigned at random. The Trump administration’s proposal would assign prospective employees to four different wage bands, with workers in the highest wage category being entered into the selection pool four times and those in the lowest wage category being entered into the selection pool once. The Department of Homeland Security stated in the proposal that the weighted system would better serve the visa program’s original intent and “incentivize employers to offer higher wages or higher skilled positions to H-1B workers and disincentivize the existing widespread use of the H-1B program to fill lower paid or lower skilled positions.”It said the proposed selection process would still maintain opportunities for employers to hire H-1B workers at “all wage levels.” ‘A strong signal’The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” across health care, tech and finance industries, and other STEM-related fields.The two new proposed policies together send “a strong signal of the direction that the administration wants to go,” said Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Immigration, a company that offers services to people navigating the immigration process in the U.S.If adopted, the policies would benefit companies seeking to keep foreigners with specialized skills who studied at American universities in the U.S., as well as ensuring H-1B visas “disproportionately go to people who are deemed higher skilled, represented by higher wages and higher salary,” he said.Trump stated Friday that changes were needed in the visa system, saying it was designed to bring in temporary workers with “additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”For the last H-1B lottery round, which closed its registration in March, about 339,000 people applied. Of those, 120,141 applications were selected for the lottery, according to USCIS data.The proposal faces a 30-day public comment period before it is considered by the administration for a final rule, a process that could take months.If the changes are adopted, companies seeking to hire lower-wage workers from India and China for computer-related jobs appear likely to be among the most affected. For more than a decade, about 60% of H-1B workers approved every year have held computer-related jobs, according to Pew Research.Start-ups and smaller companies who cannot afford to pay their workers in the higher pay categories compared to major tech companies would also be impacted, Wang said.Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures venture capital group, said in a social media post that the latest proposal would hurt many tech companies.“Overall, it’s really bad for startups, early employees, helps IT consulting shops and can be easily gamed,“ Das wrote.Trump’s announcement of a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas touched off a frenzy among current visa holders, the companies that employ them and countries around the world as they worked to understand the edict.Eventually, the White House clarified that it would be a one-time fee and apply only to new visa applicants. Trump said companies would have to pay the fee for new H-1B visa applications submitted after Sept. 21. That’s a steep rise from current fees, which are usually $2,000 to about $5,000.Both the fee and Tuesday’s proposal are likely to face challenges in court. A growing chorus on both the left and the right say an over-reliance on the visa by U.S. firms has put U.S.-born workers at a disadvantage. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called the H-1B visa program a “scam,” while the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has claimed that some of the companies most reliant on H-1B visas, such as Amazon and Facebook’s parent, Meta, have also had sizable layoffs, though it did not cite evidence that the use of the visa and the layoffs are related.In the first half of 2025, Amazon received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Meta received more than 5,000. Representatives for both companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Daniella SilvaDaniella Silva is a national reporter for NBC News, focusing on immigration and education.Rob WileRob Wile is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covering breaking business stories for NBCNews.com.Nicole AcevedoNicole Acevedo is a national reporter for NBC News and NBC Latino.

- Latest News - September 23, 2025

The proposal comes after Trump announced plans for companies to pay a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, which are used by companies to hire foreign workers.

Source link

TAGS:
15 views

Sept. 23, 2025, 2:00 PM EDTBy Max GaoCanadian comic Mae Martin knows their new Netflix limited series — which blends light-hearted comedic elements with the anxiety-inducing horror and thriller genres — may feel like a dramatic departure for anyone who is familiar with their stand-up routines and their semi-autobiographical show, “Feel Good.”“It’s funny because it doesn’t feel like a departure for me,” Martin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, told NBC News. “It feels thematically in the same universe as everything I do. It’s introspective, and there’s themes about processing adolescence and identity.”“Wayward,” which premieres Thursday, stars Martin as Alex Dempsey, a police officer who has just moved to the seemingly picturesque small town of Tall Pines with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon). During one of his first days in the city, where his wife grew up, Alex crosses paths with two students from the local academy for “troubled teens” who are desperately trying to plot their escape. As he begins investigating a series of unusual incidents, Alex suspects that Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette) — the school’s enigmatic leader who shares a troubling personal connection with Laura — might be at the center of all the town’s problems.“Alex is sort of the eyes of the audience and trying to piece it all together. It’s so seductive to be in a town that is so accepting and progressive on the surface and is offering him everything he’s always dreamed of,” Martin explained. But over the course of eight episodes, Alex, who is a transgender man, “is grappling with his moral compass and also his intense yearning to have that nuclear family and mainstream acceptance that he’s always wanted.”After Martin rose to fame internationally during the Covid-19 pandemic for co-creating the romantic dramedy series “Feel Good,” in which they played a fictionalized version of themselves, some viewers may have expected the writer to create a new project that would feel similarly autobiographical. But Martin said they have been wanting to make a show for decades set against the backdrop of the “troubled teen industry,” a term used for the broad range of controversial youth residential programs aimed at struggling teenagers.“My best friend Nicole got sent to a troubled teen institute in the States, and she was gone for about two years,” said Martin, who grew up in Toronto. “That sparked my interest in some of the shadier practices and the really strange origins of that industry, which all trace back to self-help cults in the 1970s and this really theatrical behavioral modification.”At first, Martin thought the series would be more of a classic, coming-of-age story in the vein of “Stand By Me” or “Holes.” But after hearing about their best friend’s harrowing experiences at one of those unregulated schools — where she recalled being starved, sleep deprived and forced to dig and stand in her own grave overnight — Martin could tell that a tale about troubled teens being held against their will would be much more in line with classic horror and thriller films such as “Fargo,” “Get Out” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”Over time, Martin said, they became more interested in looking “directly at how many young people are pathologized at such a young age, just for having a pretty normal reaction to a sick society.” “When you take kids who are in crisis and your reaction is punitive, you take away their opportunity to go through all the normal milestones of development, and you ascribe labels to them that really affect how they see their own potential,” they said. Mae Martin and Toni Collette in “Wayward.”Michael Gibson / NetflixMartin said they have found themselves increasingly thinking about “the state of the world that we’re passing down to young people, and about intergenerational conflict.”“As we get older, we suppress so much of our sensitivity and our critical thinking and even our empathy just in order to survive in the world,” Martin said. “So we can’t help but kind of gaslight young people out of their very correct observation that the world is insane, and that there’s a lot of hypocrisy out there.”From the outset, Martin said, they knew they wanted to play Alex. While his gender identity is only explored in passing, “a lot of his inner yearning is connected to that and how he sees himself and wants to be seen in the world,” especially as a husband and an expectant father, Martin explained.“The show’s set in 2003, and I think there wasn’t a lot of fluency around nonbinary identity then and not a lot of they/thems,” Martin noted, adding that playing a man “just made sense” to them. “Who knows where I’ll end up on that spectrum? But it felt pretty natural to me as an actor — more natural than it would’ve been to play a woman.”As the creator and co-showrunner of “Wayward,” Martin is one of the few LGBTQ writers in Hollywood who are shepherding their own mainstream projects. While they said they try not to think too much about their public profile when creating their projects, Martin said it is “scary” to be a queer creative at a time when President Donald Trump and conservatives have been actively targeting and rolling back legal protections for the queer community, especially trans and nonbinary people.Toni Collette and Joshua Close in “Wayward.”Netflix“What makes things difficult is when things are charged politically, like they are now, it makes it seem like even having a trans character or a gay character is a political statement and immediately puts your project in a niche category,” said Martin. “It’s crazy that your career can be affected by political swings like that.”Martin said they see their visibility as a prominent nonbinary comedian in the current climate as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they want to tell stories that will reach the widest audience possible and, hopefully, in turn, create more empathy for the LGBTQ community. But at the same time, Martin said, they know that their mere existence can be seen as a kind of political statement.They said they would welcome an environment where an LGBTQ character’s identity was “just incidental,” rather than a defining feature of the project, “and the focus is actually on these hugely universal themes and storylines.”In “Wayward,” for instance, “there are nuances that are specific to the queer experience that I think queer people will pick up on and relate to, but those things are pretty relatable to anyone who’s experienced any kind of otherness,” Martin said.Martin speculated that the heightened backlash against the trans community is connected to depictions of trans people that have disproportionately focused on transphobia, bigotry and trauma. “It is a part of the trans experience, but it’s just one small part of a human experience,” they said. “The more we can have diverse characters who are flawed, funny, weird and relatable, who make mistakes, who have relationships — I think that would be more helpful.”Martin acknowledged there’s been a contraction in the output of diverse stories, but they plan to keep “sneaking subversive things” into more mainstream projects.“I’ll just keep my head down, keep inundating people with scripts, and hope to ride it out and do my part,” Martin said.Max GaoMax Gao is a freelance entertainment and sports journalist based in Toronto. He has written for NBC News, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Men’s Health, Teen Vogue and W Magazine. 

- Latest News - September 23, 2025

The new Netflix horror-comedy “Wayward” stars Mae Martin as a trans cop who has just moved to a seemingly picturesque small town with his pregnant wife.

Source link

TAGS: