The Brief

In March, the Huntington Beach City Council voted 4-3 to request proposals for outsourcing its public library system to a private company, other county governments, or another third party.

Results of a survey of around 400 Huntington Beach voters released Wednesday found that 67% of them opposed a move to privatize the city’s public library system, with only 17% of those surveyed supporting the move. At a council meeting earlier in May, council members debated whether the issue should be on November’s ballot so residents could decide on it — with the majority voting against putting it on the ballot.

The survey was paid for by labor unions, whose members could be affected by the move. This includes the Orange County Employees Association, which represents municipal workers in Orange County.

Just over 40% of those surveyed visit the library a few times a year, with 87% of respondents rating the library positively.

“At this time, the city of Huntington Beach is still preparing a formal Request for Proposal, which will eventually allow the city to examine the feasibility of managed library services in Huntington Beach. Upon completion of that process, staff will present this information to the City Council for further direction,” a city spokesperson said in a statement. “A timeline for issuing an RFP and presenting that information has not been set yet. A decision by the City Council has not yet been reached as to whether or not to proceed with managed library services in the City.”

Dina Chavez, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library, said there has been a petition filed with the Huntington Beach city attorney’s office, which will require a vote by the residents as well as the majority of the council to weigh in before the library management can be privatized.

How the issue came about

In January, Library Systems & Services (LS&S) approached the city of Huntington Beach with a proposal to run the city’s four-branch library system. Their proposal said they could cut costs by around $1 million annually.

Michael Posey, a former Huntington Beach mayor and city council member who currently works for LS&S, said the company does not privatize public libraries, but rather manages the operations.

“The assets, the building, the books, the materials, the intellectual property, all remain the property of the taxpayers,” he said. “Collection management, human resources, accounting, finance, marketing, website development, all of those operations are handled by our corporate headquarters so with that we bring economies of scale and best practices to public libraries and relieve the staff of those back office duties so they have more time for patron engagement.”

Some employees of the Huntington Beach public library system are against the privatization of operations, stating that it can result in the loss of institutional knowledge as well as in the loss of collections specifically curated for the city’s residents.

Item on the ballot

At a council meeting earlier in May, the majority of the council voted against putting the issue on the November ballot.

Councilmembers Rhonda Bolton, Dan Kalmick and Natalie Moser recommended a charter amendment that would require the majority of the city council as well as the electorate to approve any plans to change how the library was managed. They also wanted to ask Huntington Beach voters in November whether they want the library managed by an outside contractor.

The three council members wrote that they have received “more than a thousand pieces of correspondence from residents, and have had dozens, if not hundreds, of other conversations with concerned parents and library patrons about the future of our public library.”

“I think the arguments for and against could be made pretty easily for the voters, it's do you think your library is broken or do you think your library is OK,” said Kalmick at the meeting.

He said putting the issue in front of voters would mean that council members would not leave an “an indelible mark without I think a lot of information” on a city institution and “harm” the library.

But Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, who voted against the motion for the charter amendment, said it is in the city’s best interest to move forward with the request for proposal process and that “the fear-mongering” should stop.

California’s last nuclear power plant overcame a regulatory hurdle on Thursday when the California Coastal Commission voted to approve keeping the plant open for at least five years.

It was one of the final obstacles the controversial Diablo Canyon Power Plant had to clear to continue operating amid renewed opposition. The decision was conditioned on a plan that would require Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns the plant, to conserve about 4,000 acres of land on its property. That would prevent it from ever being developed for commercial or residential use.

The plant, located along the San Luis Obispo shoreline, now awaits federal approval for a 20-year relicensing permit.

“I don’t think, unfortunately, that anything will be happening to Diablo Canyon soon,” due to the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence, Commissioner Jaime Lee said before voting to approve the permit. Nine of the 12 voting members approved the plan.

The deliberations reignited decades-old concerns about the dangers of nuclear power and its place in the state’s portfolio of renewable energy sources. Diablo Canyon is the state’s single-largest energy source, providing nearly 10% of all California electricity.

Defeated in their earlier attempts to shut the plant, critics of Diablo Canyon used months of Coastal Commission hearings as one of their last opportunities to vocalize their disdain for the facility. Some Democratic lawmakers supported the plant but pushed for PG&E to find more ways to protect the environment.

Sen. John Laird, Democrat of San Luis Obispo County and former secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, said on Thursday he approved of the new plan but pushed the commission to require the utility to conserve even more of its total 12,000 surrounding acres.

“If what comes out of this is the path for preservation for 8,000 acres of land, that is a remarkable victory,” Laird said.

Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis, whose district encompasses the plant, had also urged the commission in a letter to approve a permit “once it contains strong mitigation measures that reflect the values and needs of the surrounding tribal and local communities who depend on our coastal regions for environmental health, biodiversity and economic vitality.”

A long history of controversy

Founded in 1985, the plant’s striking concrete domes sit along the Pacific coast 200 miles north of Los Angeles. The facility draws in 2 million gallons of water from the ocean every day to cool its systems

And it has remained shrouded in controversy since its construction 40 years ago. Environmentalists point to the damage it causes to marine life, killing what the Coastal Commission estimates are 2 billion larval fish a year.

The commissioners on Thursday were not deciding whether to allow the plant to stay open but were weighing how best to lessen the environmental impacts of its operation. A 2022 state law forced the plant to stay open for five more years past its planned 2025 closure date, which could have led to significant political blowback against the Coastal Commission if it had rejected the permit.

Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed a 2016 agreement made between environmental groups and worker unions to close the plant after the state faced a series of climate disasters that spurred energy blackouts. Popular sentiment toward nuclear energy has also continued to grow more supportive as states across the country consider revitalizing dormant and aging nuclear plants to fulfill ever-increasing energy demand needs.

The 2022 law authorized a $1.4 billion loan to be paid back with federal loans or profits.

Groups such as the Environmental Defense Center and Mothers for Peace opposed the permit outright, citing concerns about radioactive waste, which can persist for centuries, and its cost to taxpayers.

“We maintain that any extension of Diablo is unnecessary,” and that its continued operations could slow the development of solar and wind energy, Jeremy Frankel, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center told the commission Thursday.

The California Public Utilities Commission last year approved $723 million in ratepayer funds toward Diablo Canyon’s operating costs this year. It was the first time rate hikes were spread to ratepayers of other utilities such as Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric and was authorized by lawmakers because the plant provides energy to the entire state.

How the plant will be funded has also garnered scrutiny in the years since Newsom worked to keep it open. Last year, the Legislature nearly canceled a $400 million loan to help finance it.

As much as $588 million is unlikely to come back due to insufficient federal funding and projected profits, CalMatters has reported.

Proponents of the plant pointed to its reliability, carbon-free pollution and the thousands of jobs it has created.

Business advocacy groups emphasized their support for the plant as boosting the economy.

“It is an economic lifeline that helps keep our communities strong and competitive,” Dora Westerlund, president of the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation, said at a November meeting.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

There is a new cost to hiring an international worker to fill a vital but otherwise vacant position in a California classroom: $100,000.

In September, the Trump administration began requiring American employers to pay a $100,000 sponsorship fee for new H-1B visas, on top of already required visa application fees that amount to $9,500 to $18,800, depending on various factors. These visas allow skilled and credentialed workers in multiple job sectors to stay in the U.S.

Most foreign workers on H-1Bs in California work in the tech sector. But California also relies on H-1B visas to address another issue: a nationwide teacher shortage and a high demand for staff in dual-language education and special education in K-12 districts.

Data from the California Department of Education shows school districts filed more than 300 visa applications for the 2023-24 school year, double the amount from just two years earlier. Educators and school officials say its overseas workers on visas are highly skilled, instrumental in multilingual education, and fill historically understaffed positions in special education.

Now education leaders are sounding the alarm that the high additional fee for overseas workers will worsen the strain on California’s public education system.

International employees fill a much-needed gap for school districts

California continues to face an ongoing teacher shortage. In 2023, California K-12 schools staffed 46,982 positions with employees whose credentials did not align with their job assignments, according to data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Another 22,012 educator positions were left vacant that year. Of total misassignments and vacancies, around 28% were in English language development and 11.9% were in special education.

California school districts have also resorted to hiring teachers who haven’t yet obtained certain credentials, according to a study by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute. Facing a need for teachers, school districts have found that trained professionals from other countries are willing — and qualified — to take classroom jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.

A student letter written for H.R., a physical education teacher.

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Manuel Orbegozo

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CalMatters

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Books on physical education in the office of H.R. at a high school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, on Nov. 7, 2025.

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Manuel Orbegozo

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CalMatters

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In 2023, in the Bay Area east of San Francisco, West Contra Costa Unified School District had 381 misassigned positions and 711 vacancies, according to the commission. So the district turned to foreign educators, hiring about 88 teachers on H-1B visas — a majority from the Philippines, Spain and Mexico — to teach in mostly dual-language and special education programs, said Sylvia Greenwood, the assistant superintendent for human resources at the district.

“With our shortages in special ed, they were a good fit for our district. And so, therefore, we kept that pipeline open and brought teachers here from the Philippines to support our students and our students with special needs,” Greenwood said.

The decline in the number of credentialed special education teachers continues to worsen. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of credentials earned to teach special education decreased by almost 600 across California, according to data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The number of temporary permits and waivers granted by the commission increased by about 300 during the same period.

Francisco Ortiz, the president of United Teachers of Richmond and a teacher at Ford Elementary School in West Contra Costa, said the workload for teachers in the district will increase if West Contra Costa Unified is unable to bring in new international teachers.

This would create “greater instability” for students, he said, adding, “It's going to have a great impact in special education, which is already on fire.”

California school district officials say they are unsure they can pay the new fee to fill hiring gaps with international employees. West Contra Costa officials said they do not know yet who will be responsible for paying the new fee: the district, international teachers themselves or another party.

“We are a district that is dealing with a structural deficit as well, and so that cost, in a lot of ways, is going to be very difficult for our district or really any school district, to be able to take that on,” said Cheryl Cotton, the superintendent for West Contra Costa.

Pasadena Unified, in Southern California, filed about a dozen applications for H-1B visa sponsorships in 2024. Now the district, facing a $27 million budget deficit, will require those applying for H-1B visas to pay for it themselves, according to district spokesperson Hilda Ramirez Horvath. She said foreign employees will also no longer receive other types of financial support, including legal or filing fees related to immigration processing.

Language programs benefit from international teachers

District officials are also worried about the cultural costs of losing international educators. Educators on H-1B visas make dual-language public schools possible, giving families in California a unique multicultural education that sticks with their children for life.

Kelleen Peckham, a mother to two children in West Contra Costa, said she chose to transfer her daughter to Washington Elementary School in Richmond because it has a dual-language immersion program that teaches students to speak and read Spanish.

Peckham also plans to send her son, who will start kindergarten next year, to the same school even though it takes the family an extra 15 minutes to drive there.

“My husband's family is from Mexico, and so [their] grandmother, on one side, only speaks Spanish,” Peckham said. “It's important for [them] to be able to communicate with [their] family and extended family.”

She said if the dual-language immersion program at Washington Elementary doesn’t survive, she would consider transferring her children back to the school in their neighborhood.

First-grade students walk to their classroom at the start of the day during summer session at Laurel Elementary in Oakland on June 11, 2021.

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Anne Wernikoff

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Fee spells ‘Keep Out’ to foreign workers

Within weeks of the fee’s announcement, a coalition of international worker groups, unions and religious organizations sued the Trump administration, alleging the fee would inhibit staffing in education, medicine and ministry services.

“It’s essentially a giant ‘Keep Out’ sign for prospective individuals looking to utilize the visa process to be able to come to the United States and fill these roles and provide these services,” said Laura Flores-Perilla, an attorney with the Justice Action Center, a Los Angeles-based immigration litigation group representing the coalition in its lawsuit.

“It's not just going to hurt these individuals who have this pathway to do this, but it's also going to hurt employers within the United States,” Flores-Perilla said.

Although the fee only applies to new visa applicants, many international teachers are feeling less welcomed to work and live in the states. A.F., an international elementary school teacher in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, said many teachers are still concerned the federal government will announce new policy changes that could force them to leave the U.S.

“I feel like it's a form of discrimination to impose [a] $100,000 fee for teachers,” A.F. said.

A.F., an elementary school teacher who works on a H-1B visa at West Contra Costa School District, writes out a list of grammar rules he will teach his students the next day.

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Alina Ta

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CalMatters

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A.F., who is currently on an H-1B visa, asked to only give his initials because he fears speaking publicly will affect his ability to receive a green card in the future. He immigrated from the Philippines to California five years ago on a J-1 visa before transferring to an H-1B visa at the beginning of 2025. J-1 visas allow visitors to temporarily stay in the U.S. to participate in certain programs, including teaching, studying, conducting research and more, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

A.F. said the district previously paid for all of his immigration costs for his H-1B visa, which amounted to more than $3,700 for processing fees and an immigration attorney.

The future is uncertain for H-1B visa hopefuls

H.R., a physical education teacher in West Contra Costa who works on a short-term J-1 visa, said he moved his family from Mexico to the U.S. three years ago to work at one of the district’s high schools because he felt it would be safer to raise his daughter in the U.S. H.R. requested to use only his initials because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his ability to apply for the H-1B visa in the future.

“My biggest reason [for moving] is my daughter,” he said. “Me and my wife decided that it would be a good chance for her [and] a big opportunity to learn the language and to grow up in a different environment.”

H.R. can’t apply for the H-1B visa because he missed the deadline and West Contra Costa Unified is now unlikely to pay for his immigration fees. After his visa expires in June 2026, H.R. will move back to Mexico with his family and reapply for the J-1 visa in hopes of returning to California.

“Everybody says here that they need teachers in California … but they don't want to do anything to [help us stay] here,” H.R. said.

H.R., a physical education teacher at a high school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, on Nov. 7, 2025. H.R., who immigrated to the U.S. two years ago, may have to return to his home country due to a new H-1B visa fee implemented by the Trump administration.

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Manuel Orbegozo

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CalMatters

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At the Los Angeles Unified School District, spokesperson Christy Hagen said in an email to CalMatters that the recent visa changes have not yet impacted the school’s hiring of educators on H-1B visas. Hagen said the district’s immigration experts were “still evaluating the effect of this order.”

Maria Miranda, a representative for United Teachers Los Angeles — the union for Los Angeles Unified teachers — said the district had, as of mid-November, not provided any guidance to its educators or schools on how H-1B visa hopefuls would be supported.

Flores-Perilla, the attorney bringing the lawsuit against the Trump administration, says no hearings have been set in their case yet. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has now also brought a lawsuit over the $100,000 fee, arguing that the proclamation overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and harms U.S. employers.

For now, districts will have to wait on the results of either lawsuit to potentially see some relief in immigration costs.

“It's absolutely unfeasible to be able to pay this fee [and] to be able to actually bring in prospective employees in their fields and industries, so it's going to hurt everyone,” Flores-Perilla said.

Sophie Sullivan and Alina Ta are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Trump administration is proposing new rules that would further tighten its grip on who's allowed into the U.S., asking visitors from several dozen countries that benefit from visa-free travel to hand over their social media history and other personal information.

The new conditions were unveiled in a notice from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this week and are open for public comment and review for 60 days before going into effect.

The proposed measure applies to citizens from the 42 countries that belong to the visa waiver program and currently don't require visas for tourist or business visits to the U.S. Those foreign citizens would now have to submit five years' worth of their social media activity to be considered for entry.

They'd also have to provide emails they have used for the past 10 years, as well as phone numbers and home addresses of immediate family members. Officials would also be able to scrutinize IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the mandatory social media requirement is designed to comply with President Donald Trump's January executive order "to protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes." However, they have not defined what type of online activity may constitute a threat.

Under the current visa waiver program, tourists can bypass the visa application process, which can take months to years. Instead, they pay $40 and submit an online application using the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA. It's accessible to citizens of U.S. allied countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. But that system may also get an overhaul if the latest changes take effect. The notice proposes eliminating online applications, moving to a mobile-only platform.

This is the latest step in the Trump administration's escalation of restrictions and surveillance of international travelers, foreign students and immigrants. In June, the State Department announced it will begin reviewing the social media accounts of foreign students. Earlier this month, the department instructed its staff to reject visa applications — primarily H-1B — from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities, citing it as "censorship" of Americans' speech.

These latest proposed changes are not that different from those already in place for visa applicants, Marissa Montes, a professor at Loyola Law School, and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic, told NPR.

"It's always been something that the government can ask for and has asked for in the past," Montes said. "The question is, how will [ESTA applicants] be screened by CPB? Will it be something they have to submit ahead of time or will it be an officer at a point of entry? We still don't know how the administration expects to implement this."

In the past, she said, such screenings occurred at the point of entry and that "it's always been discretionary if the officer wants to ask for it or not."

What is most troubling, Montes added, is that there are no explicit guidelines defining what qualifies as harmful to the United States.

"The problem is that when it comes to immigration policy and directives like this is that it's very broad and discretionary, meaning that the agent that is receiving this order has a lot of discretion to then interpret what can be viewed as anti-American," she said. "But we have seen that be interpreted as anything that goes against the Trump administration or is going against a value of the Trump administration."

Montes said she advises her clients to be mindful of not just their own online posts, but also posts they've liked, commented on and re-posted, which can be grounds for a denial or even a permanent ban from the U.S. For example, if someone has posts regarding casual drug use, or pictures of firearms, they can be viewed as a potential threat to the government. She said agents are also on the look out for posts that can be construed as pro-socialist or communist.

She cautions people not to eliminate their social media presence entirely, saying it's "become a red flag" for officials.

"Our immigration laws bar certain types of conduct because of immigration bias … so you really have to be careful about what you put out there," she warned. "As I always tell my clients, if I can find the information, the government certainly can."

Copyright 2025 NPR

Chop suey was once a classic Chinese American dish enjoyed on December 25 — a day when most other restaurants were closed — by Jews and other non-Christians.

These days, we tend to think of chop suey as a mishmash of stir-fried ingredients that emerged from immigrant communities in the United States. But its roots run deep, says Miranda Brown, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She wrote a 2021 article called "The Hidden, Magnificent History of Chop Suey" for the website Atlas Obscura.

"It's a dish that is chopped offal," she says. "Lung, liver, tripe, kidneys."

Yes, originally chop suey was primarily made of organ meats. Brown is quick to note that offal is flavorful, rich in nutrients, and was enjoyed widely until a few generations ago, thanks, in part to industrial meat packaging processes.

"It can be chewy, it can be buttery, it can be kind of rubbery," Brown says of offal's distinctive textures. "For some people, that's really kind of exciting. Bouncy!"

The origins of the dish itself bounces back hundreds of years, she says, to imperial China.

"We have references to chop suey in Ming Dynasty texts," she notes. "The Journey to the West, which is a famous novel [from the 16th century], has a reference to chop suey. You will find it on fancy banquet menus. A version of the dish was even eaten at the Qing court."

When Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the mid-1800s wanted to impress local officials, Brown says, they held banquets similar to ones back home, with 300-course meals that would get written up in local newspapers, in articles marveling over delicacies such as Peking duck, chop suey and bird's nest soup.

"All the bling foods that were popular when you had to [build] a good relationship with a person who had a lot of say about your life," Brown says.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted immigration heavily, but Chinese restaurants still spread rapidly across the United States. By the early 1900s, chop suey had become a cultural phenomenon, a beloved ambassador dish to what had been an unfamiliar cuisine to many Americans.

Louis Armstrong recorded a song in 1926 called "Cornet Chop Suey." The 1958 musical Flower Drum Song dedicated an entire number to it. And in the movie A Christmas Story, set in the 1940s and based on the writings of Jean Shepherd, a white, Midwestern, working-class family celebrates Christmas at a Chinese restaurant called the Bo Ling Chop Suey Palace.

"It was exotic," Brown says. "It involves a little bit of adventure, and it is a name that people can pronounce."

But by the late 20th century, chop suey had fallen out of fashion. Brown says she never saw it on menus in her home city of San Francisco in the 1980s, when she was growing up. By then, Americans had deepened their appreciation of Chinese food, thanks in large part to popular cookbook author, PBS host and restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.

Before she died in 2020 at the age of 100, Chiang told NPR she thought it was hilarious how so many Americans had believed that the contemporary versions of chop suey were authentic. "They think, oh, chop suey is the only thing we have in China," she said in a 2017 NPR interview. "What a shame!"

"I think for her, it had just evolved to the point where it was no longer recognizable," says Miranda Brown, whose own mixed heritage is half white, half Chinese. "Foods evolve. I always think, if I met my great-great-grandparents, would they recognize me? Would they see elements of their faces in mine or my daughter's? And I would guess not. Something similar happened with Chinese food in America. When a dish leaves, a hundred years later it has evolved, a lot."

And perhaps it's about time, Brown says, for chop suey's next evolution: to make a comeback.
Copyright 2025 NPR