Well, that was the easy part. Where's the funding going to come from to pay domestic workers?
Edit: for the downvoters -- a citation to back up my assertion: https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/president-tru...
Wait, so they were underpaying the H1B workers the way they're explicitly prohibited by law from doing?
Electrical engineering related hires had salaries between $47k - $55k. Looking at other H1B salary data for those years (2001 - 2003)[2], and the TVA salaries seem on par with other H1B hires(they're neither the lowest, nor the highest). Chattanooga where all these hires were at also has a fairly low cost of living, so $55k sounds like a decent wage for the area.
The more recent hires were all managerial level, and range from $90k - $130k. Not sure how competitive those were with domestic hires at the time (last H1B hire was in 2008), but overall they're fairly high salaries. And these were all in Nashville, where that wage is enough to support a family living in the well-to-do suburbs of the area.
[1] https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=TENNESSEE+VALL...
[2] https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=ELECTRICAL+ENG...
Skills for one. The way H1B was really meant to be used. I am not arguing TVA did this. But there ARE reasons to hire H1B workers other than cost. Case in point Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
It's supposed to be an essentially merit-based path to immigration, and if true, that would make it exactly the kind of program that Trump should 100% support.
To the extent that H1B accomplishes this objective of highly skilled labor at prevailing market wages, I think it's a useful program that has a place in the overall immigration system.
From a macroeconomic view, even when limited to bringing in skilled labor to fulfill a specific market shortage, this will still depress the prevailing wage in that market, which theoretically prevents the market from correcting when rising wages induce increased local supply.
Fundamentally something is broken with the wage market when real wages have not grown in decades. Partially this is a problem with the measurement not correctly accounting for significantly increased cost of [healthcare] benefits covered by the employer share. But I believe even when accounting for the full employer-side cost of wages, this number has not grown as expected, and low-wage work visas are part of the problem.