Did Texas Tech Violate Abbott's H-1B Freeze?
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Did Texas Tech Violate Abbott’s H-1B Freeze?
Serious questions are being raised about H-1B filings for random jobs at Texas Tech.
That’s a Labor Condition Application notice, the first step toward filing an H-1B visa. It was posted at Texas Tech from June 22 to July 6. One “Web Developer, Marketing & Communications.” A three-year gig for one super, highly-specialized tech guru making $60,000. The role had to be opened to the global workforce to find someone with the right set of skills for such deep complexity.
This role reports to Texas Tech’s Marketing & Communications department. That department has about seventy employees. It has a Web team, a Digital Communications team, a Design team, a Storytelling team, and three separate enrollment marketing teams (their staff page is live here, archived here in case it gets camera-shy). Somewhere in that giant org chart is one job so special it needed a federal visa to fill: making web pages for a marketing department. (Show us something this web developer does that an AI can’t one-shot in an hour.) Millions of American graduates can do this work. Texas Tech graduates a fresh batch of them every few months.
You may be confused at this point, because you remember Governor Greg Abbott did something about all the H-1Bs taking random roles for random reasons, living in all the houses Americans are trying to buy, etc.
Yes, wise patriot with an excellent memory, back in January, Governor Abbott ordered every state agency and public university to freeze new H-1B petitions until May 2027. Not just freeze them, but “immediately suspend” any preparation of them. Want an exception? You need written approval from the Texas Workforce Commission. “State government must lead by example,” said the Governor.
So this notice at Texas Tech went up five months into the freeze, before the application was even filed with the feds (the case number field is blank). Naturally, we have some very sophisticated questions. Did Texas Tech just prep a brand new H-1B petition in defiance of the Governor? Or is there a piece of paper in Austin certifying that a marketing web developer is talent so rare, so essential, that the Governor’s freeze had to bend for it? A special exception perhaps? And if that paper exists, how many more like it has TWC handed out since January?
So we filed an open records request with TWC for every freeze exception requested and granted by any state agency or university since January 27, plus the list of existing H-1B workers Texas Tech was required to turn in. That will be interesting to read.
Ten business days, gentlemen.
Now let us tell you what those documents will most likely show.
Nothing.
No violation. No exception. Nothing to except, because nothing was frozen. Look at the notice again. It lists two worksites: the Lubbock campus, and a rental house on 67th Street. They would not put a specific three-bedroom rental on the paperwork for some hypothetical future hire from overseas. Whoever this visa is for is already here and already on the payroll. Which means this is almost certainly a routine extension. And guess what: extensions were never frozen. Every H-1B worker already inside Texas government just rolls forward, three years at a time, right through the “freeze.”
In other words, the viral notice most likely proves another scam, and the scam is the freeze itself. We told you in April that this ban targeted theoretical H-1B workers, positions and jobs that do not exist, but that could theoretically exist in the future. The actual ones kept badging in Monday morning. Nothing happened.
I had a close personal friend call me when the Abbott announcement happened. He a nervous hope in his voice. “Tommy” he said. “Is it true that Abbott is getting rid of the H-1Bs? Please tell me it’s true. Someone’s gotta do something about this. It’s out of control.”
It was cute. He thought something was going to happen.
None of this is new for Texas. We’ve previously covered how the Texas Enterprise Fund handed millions in “job creation” money to Infosys and Cognizant while their Texas offices filed thousands of H-1B applications. Infosys, by the way, fresh off a record $34 million ICE settlement for systemic visa fraud.
Abbott's “ban” announcement got millions of views. The corrections telling the real story got far less.
Yes, that’s right. State governments can still use H-1B workers as long as there is an additional layer of middlemen. It’s both conservative (most ever) and fiscally responsible.
Could TWC’s records surprise us? Sure. A defiant university or a stack of rubber-stamped exceptions would be a different article, and a fun one. (Lubbock readers: the visa paperwork sits in a public access file at Texas Tech that federal law says any random member of the public can walk in and look at. Just saying.)
But if the freeze actually worked the way the press release implied, that bulletin board would be empty.
We'll continue monitoring this situation. Harder than usual, even.
Young Republicans Claim Victory in Name Drama
Recently, the Young Republicans of Texas (YRT), the official youth arm of the Texas GOP, won their legal battle against the Texas Young Republicans Federation (TYRF). Needless to say, the former was quite elated with their victory.
The lawsuit started because TYRF didn’t like that YRT had a similar-ish name. We covered the early lawsuit drama here:
While there’ll probably still be bad blood in some form (though we hope for unity before November), it’s nice to see the drama ended. Anyway, Current Revolt could still start its own Young Republicans group and make it a threesome. There'll probably be more ladies at ours than either group.
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