President Donald Trump signed a proclamation that imposes a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, the immigration allocation set aside for highly skilled workers the U.S. economy needs. The new rules threaten the availability and deployment of human capital in the United States. This is misguided and will hurt U.S. growth and innovation, at a time when the global arms race for AI creates a vital need for the sharpest human talent and innovators.

We are professors who study and teach innovation-related topics at U.S. research universities. As immigrants to the United States from India and Panama respectively, we understand firsthand the sometimes painful discussions around H-1B immigration. Tensions around immigration routinely affect our academic institutions, our current students and former students now in industry. But there should be a lot of common ground on this polarizing topic.

STEM immigrants are creating substantial value in the United States. Immigrants play a significant role in entrepreneurial ventures in the United States and particularly startup innovation. Further, such immigrants are responsible for 23% of innovation output in the United States. This effect is in part based on policies that allow for foreign students to study and stay in the United States to work in startups.

H-1B immigration is like a natural selection process that benefits the U.S. immensely. Highly skilled immigrants in areas such as technology and medicine come hungry for hard work and full of ideas to better the world — to create new products, services and even markets as well as to cater to existing needs through more incremental improvement and optimization. Many of our best students are immigrants who are looking to stay in the United States and create work opportunities that would not be possible anywhere else in the world. In the United States, we recognize entrepreneurial success perhaps more than any other country. It is one of our greatest attributes as a society.

Nevertheless, we do have an immigration problem in the United States. The problem is that the distribution of benefits across the United States is highly skewed. Much of the wealth generated in terms of company creation and jobs has redounded to innovative clusters. But the idea to reduce the total number of H-1B immigrants by increasing the cost is exactly the wrong way to “solve” this problem — by dragging down the thriving parts of the economy rather than lifting up the rest.

To grow economic prosperity throughout the country, we need to offer more opportunities for more H-1B visa applicants. There are simply not enough trained U.S. nationals to take on the sort of labor required for the next wave of a tech-enabled industrial revolution.

Distributing the fruits of H-1B visa holders’ work more broadly requires a different approach than the U.S. has taken before. We should increase the total number of new H-1B visa recipients each year to 350,000 from around 85,000, with the additional visas apportioned across states so that locations like college towns — places like Lawrence, Kan., Gainesville, Fla., and Clemson, S.C., as well as cities such as Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Boise, receive sufficient numbers of H-1B workers. Visas could be allocated through a process akin to the resident-matching system for medical doctors, thereby sending workers to states where they would create greater value by filling economic and technological gaps. This infusion of labor would improve technological innovation in local economies and create local spillover effects in job creation and additional innovation.

Such immigration is necessary particularly now given a global push toward increased industrial policy, as China and others invest in AI and broader digital transformation. At a time when our national security is linked to technological innovation, it is shortsighted not to open ourselves to more immigration. If we do not, we will lose some of the best and brightest minds to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore and other countries.

Immigration is currently a volatile political issue in the U.S., as it has been at some other moments in the nation’s history. Although this is a country of immigrants, for people who feel insecure about pocketbook and cultural issues, continued immigration can feel threatening. As a percentage of people living in the United States, it has been more than 100 years since there were as many immigrants here as there are now. But as with past waves of immigration, productivity and transformation have followed.

This is particularly clear for H-1B visa holders, who create opportunities for people born in the U.S. and ensure the vitality of American innovation, security and democratic values. Increasing the costs of such visas would chill their use and reduce U.S. prosperity and innovation exactly at a time of great need.

Hemant Bhargava is a professor of business at UC Davis Graduate School of Management and director of the Center for Analytics and Technology in Society. D. Daniel Sokol is a professor of law and business at USC. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

And after months of blustery talk from President Donald Trump about lowering drug prices and cracking down on Big Pharma, his plans are finally starting to take shape, beginning with pacts with manufacturers.

But before we get too excited, consumers should demand more transparency about what they’re getting from his dealmaking — and ask who is truly benefiting from the sum of his health care actions.

Trump wisely put the issue of drug costs front and center, promising consumers a better deal than what his predecessors could extract from companies. His main strategy has been to threaten pharma companies with outlandishly high tariffs if they didn’t comply with his demands, which included reshoring manufacturing, bringing U.S. drug prices in line with those in Europe, and expanding direct-to-consumer sales.

The deal with Pfizer announced last week seemed to check all the president’s boxes by offering most-favored-nation prices to Medicaid, a commitment to invest in U.S. production, and an agreement to feature some of its branded drugs on a TrumpRx portal. In exchange, the company is exempt from tariffs for the next three years. Other companies appear to be negotiating their own deals, fueling a sense that months of uncertainty and anxiety may soon be in Big Pharma’s rear window.

All of that sounds promising — until you look at the details, which remain murky.

When weighing the merits of the deal for consumers, it’s worth noting the differences in language between Trump’s press conferences, the White House fact sheet, and Pfizer’s press release, says Stacie Dusetzina, who studies drug policy and prices at Vanderbilt University.

A few words in the Pfizer release stand out. “Voluntary,” for example, and “confidential.” The careful language and lack of real details about the arrangement suggest that, despite the fanfare, “Pfizer got a really good PR deal out of it,” Dusetzina says.

It’s far less clear if American health care consumers got a good deal.

For starters, few people are likely to benefit from Trump’s direct-to-consumer website. Yes, Pfizer has agreed to sell drugs there at discounts as high as 85%, and an average of about 50%, but people with insurance usually pay only a fraction of list prices or a small copay. That significantly narrows the site’s appeal mainly to people without insurance, or to those whose insurance no longer covers a brand-name drug they prefer.

But even that group might not find it helpful. Discounting a wildly expensive drug can still leave patients with a crushing bill. Take, for example, the 40% price cut for Pfizer’s arthritis treatment Xeljanz that the White House touted in its fact sheet. With a list price of more than $6,000 per month, patients would still be on the hook for about $3,600 per month. (That same drug, notably, can easily be found for a lower price through GoodRx.)

Many pharma companies were already setting up their own direct-to-consumer websites, and Trump’s demands seem to be simply accelerating that move. Amgen, for example, announced Monday it would sell its cholesterol-lowering treatment Repatha at a 60% discount on a newly established site and eventually offer it through TrumpRx. (Like Xeljanz, the drug can be found at the same discounted price on GoodRx.) And Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs offers a transparent pricing model, raising the question of whether TrumpRx will offer consumers anything new or better.

Meanwhile, Medicaid’s most-favored-nation pricing approach also sounds promising, but it’s nearly impossible to gauge savings. Dusetzina points out that it’s unclear how Medicaid’s current payments compare to international prices. And because legislation that went into effect last year discourages price hikes and incentivizes cuts, it’s possible that Medicaid may already pay less than other countries for older brand-name drugs.

“The details really matter, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get the details to be able to understand if this was a good deal or not for the American public,” Dusetzina says.

Amid all the bluster, it would be easy for the public to overlook the other, more substantive health policy changes the Trump administration is making — unfortunately, some to consumers’ detriment.

The biggest are deep cuts to Medicaid and the likely expiration of subsidies used by most people with Affordable Care Act health plans. Combined with smaller policy shifts, these changes will result in an estimated 15 million more uninsured Americans by 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. For them, drugs will be far more expensive without insurance coverage — and studies show that cost is a major factor in whether people stick to their medications.

And while health policy experts are relieved that the Trump administration isn’t completely scrapping Medicare’s new drug-price negotiation powers, the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill significantly watered them down.

In a gift to pharma, the bill broadened reprieves to drugs that treat rare conditions. Under the original law, a medication treating a so-called orphan disease was exempt from Medicare negotiations. Trump’s bill expanded the scope, allowing drugs treating multiple rare conditions to be excluded altogether, and delaying the negotiations for drugs that first came onto the market as rare treatments but later gained approval for common conditions.

That shift could potentially delay Medicare’s ability to negotiate key drug prices, eating into projected savings — and ultimately costing seniors more. The CBO initially projected the change would sacrifice some $5 billion in savings, but that calculation is  viewed as a gross underestimate because it excluded the impact of several blockbuster drugs.

Merck & Co. and Bristol Myers Squibb, which market lucrative cancer immunotherapies that are expected to get a year’s reprieve, are among the biggest winners. Medicare accounts for a substantial portion of Merck’s revenue from Keytruda, which is projected to top $31 billion this year. In 2023, the government program spent some $5.4 billion on the cancer treatment — about a fifth of its total sales.

Trump’s focus on lowering drug prices targets a critical issue for Americans. But without far greater transparency, it’s impossible to assess whether his wheeling and dealing benefits consumers as much as it does Big Pharma. Until then, it’s hard not to worry that he’s creating the illusion of big savings, while behind the scenes making consequential decisions that could cost patients and the government dearly.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

In a world that often seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos, what hope is there for defenseless fish?

The Atlantic cod off the eastern coast of Canada were once such an abundant resource that their dried flesh helped drive the colonization of the Americas, spawning local delicacies from Spanish bacalao to Jamaican ackee and saltfish. Industrialized harvesting caused a collapse in populations in the 1980s and 1990s, leading many diners to switch to monkfish instead — until that species, too, went into decline.

It can feel like an inevitable cycle. Humans seem incapable of carrying out the most basic measures to protect common resources from over-exploitation — whether it’s the carbon that we spew into the atmosphere, the plastics that we scatter through the environment, or wild animals that we’ve been hunting to extinction since the paleolithic era. And yet on the high seas, there are encouraging signs that concerted efforts can reverse the process.

Take tuna. Like cod and monkfish, the most prized species once seemed to be on the verge of disappearance, thanks largely to our insatiable hunger for sushi. The skipjack tuna that you’ll typically find in cans is super-abundant, but the three main species of bluefin tuna were in a much more precarious state. Bluefins are  rarer, slow-growing and can be as long as a small car. Diners, particularly in Japan, prize their flesh for its complex, buttery taste, and fish sometimes sell for millions of dollars apiece.

The global catch fell by half between 2005 and 2011 as years of overfishing left populations too small to rebuild themselves. In 2010, a proposal to ban commerce in Atlantic bluefin came close to passing at the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a move that would have given it similar levels of protection to the rhinoceros and elephant. The following year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that more than half of tuna species were facing extinction. There was “little hope of recovery” for the southern bluefin, one of the IUCN’s authors was quoted as saying.

That’s not what happened. The same year, the countries fishing the southern bluefin’s habitat in the Indian and Southern Oceans for the first time agreed to joint limits on how much they could catch. Monitoring of fish stocks could provide a decent estimate of how many animals were out there, and how fast they were reproducing. By keeping the catch within reasonable bounds, the fishery could gradually rebuild to the point where populations were sustainable and exploitation was profitable.

The policy, along with similar measures to preserve other tuna species, was a remarkable success.

A revision to the IUCN’s endangered list in 2021 took the Atlantic bluefin from “endangered” to “least concern;” albacore and yellowfin, both seen as “near threatened” in 2011, were also moved to “least concern.” Southern bluefin, which had been seen as “critically endangered” since the 1990s, was lifted to merely “endangered.” As populations recovered, catches of the southern species nearly doubled, from 9,400 tons in 2011 to 17,000 in 2021.

Right now, tuna is probably one of the most sustainable wild fish you can eat. Some 99.3% now comes from sustainable stocks, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization recently, with 87% of stocks now being fished sustainably. That’s far better than the average 64.5% of stocks across all fish species.

With the exception of Mediterranean albacore (a favorite of Spanish canneries) and bigeye in the Indian Ocean, every population is now being fished within sustainable levels. Compare that to Atlantic cod, where just 21.7% of stocks are being fished sustainably, and the difference is stark.

There’s a lesson in this: Capitalist self-interest, combined with intensive regulation, can work — even when it’s being driven by our obsession with particular high-value foods. On land, we think of monocultures — the dominance of major food groups such as corn, apples and chickens — as a bad thing. In the ocean, where it’s inherently difficult to get a handle on just how many fish are lurking in the depths, monocultures can be beneficial. The fish that are most caught are, by and large, the ones that are best understood, and the easiest to manage sustainably.

Intensive management and catch quotas, like the rules helping the southern bluefin to recover, are also spreading beyond the richest countries to the likes of Thailand and Indonesia.

There’s no cause for complacency, however. Even fish being sustainably harvested could be just a few years away from an unexpected population collapse, and a growing human population with rising incomes and improving capture technology is inevitably going to maintain pressure on wild stocks for centuries to come.

Still, there’s nothing foreordained about our despoliation of the environment. In the seas, as on land and in the atmosphere, our efforts to rein in our over-exploitative tendencies can still find success.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of Anton “Tony” Lazzaro, the formerly well-connected Republican donor convicted of giving teenage girls gifts, alcohol and money in exchange for sex.

On Monday, the high court turned away Lazzaro with no comment. In February, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also denied his appeal.

Anton Lazzaro

In August 2023, Lazzaro was sentenced to 21 years in prison on federal sex trafficking convictions. He was convicted of seven counts involving “commercial sex acts” with five girls ages 15 and 16 in 2020, when Lazzaro was 30. The charges carried mandatory minimum sentences of 10 years with a maximum of life in prison.

Prosecutors had requested a 30-year sentence for Lazzaro. They likened Lazzaro to financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of paying underage girls for massages and then abusing them at his homes in Florida and New York. The defense asked for no more than 10 years.

Lazzaro, who has said the charges against him were politically motivated, maintained his innocence, denying that he paid any of the girls explicitly for sex.

Lazzaro’s indictment in 2021 touched off a political firestorm that led to the downfall of Jennifer Carnahan as chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota.

His co-defendant, Gisela Castro Medina, who was 19 at the time, formerly led the College Republicans chapter at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. She pleaded guilty to two counts last year. She testified against Lazzaro and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Prosecutors argued during his trial that Lazzaro enlisted Castro Medina, who he initially paid for sex, to recruit other teenagers — preferably minors — who were white, small, vulnerable or “broken.” He often sent cars to take the girls to his luxury penthouse condo at the Hotel Ivy in downtown Minneapolis, they said.

Pictures on Lazzaro’s social media accounts showed him with prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. He gave more than $270,000 to Republican campaigns and political committees over the years. Several recipients quickly donated those contributions to charity after the charges became public.

The sources of Lazzaro’s wealth have been murky. Defense filings called him “an up-and-coming real estate owner and entrepreneur.” Items seized from him included a 2010 Ferrari and more than $371,000 in cash.

Related Articles

Forest Lake schools presses state leaders to follow federal order on trans athletes

As some big names sit out St. Paul mayor’s race, others ponder city’s challenges

MN to launch paid family, medical leave program Jan. 1. How will it work?

MN GOP push school safety measures over gun control. Are SROs an option?

Government shutdown’s effect on Minnesota will depend on how long it lasts