The H-1B program has created a workplace disaster, compromising security and degrading the quality of everyday software while crushing job prospects for American workers. Corporate tech insiders confirm that the number of Americans on their left and right has steadily dropped over the past decade, especially after COVID. Offshore offices multiply as foreign workers arrive under visas, building internal portals for insurance companies, managing databases storing medical records, and writing code behind bank and utility apps.
The root cause lies in boardrooms across Fortune 500 companies: fire Americans, import cheaper labor, and call it efficiency. Why pay an American engineer $150,000 when an H-1B worker costs $100,000 and can be deported for missing an unrealistic goal?
A pattern repeats across company after company. An H-1B hire climbs the ladder to director or vice president, earning that rise by finding “inefficiencies” which usually means firing Americans. He then pushes leadership to open more H-1B slots or contract with a “consulting firm” staffed almost entirely from abroad. Executives applaud because invoices are low and offshore teams rarely say no to any request, no matter how impossible. When savings look good enough, leadership shutsters the American division altogether, replacing it with an “innovation center” in Bangalore.
The American worker who survives this gets a grim reward: meetings at 6 a.m. to accommodate India Standard Time, an office filled with co-workers who share neither language nor culture, an org chart dominated by unfamiliar and unpronounceable names, and a career path with no upward mobility. And that’s if the worker is fortunate enough to have a job at all. Bleak.
According to the Cengage Group’s 2025 Employability Report, only 41% of 2024 college graduates found full-time work related to their fields. In 2025, that number fell to 30. Some analysts blame AI, but the claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. A recent MIT report found that despite $30-$40 billion in corporate spending on AI tools, 95% of organizations show no return on that investment—even though nearly half of office workers already use AI in some form.
If AI were truly replacing white-collar workers at scale, why did these same corporations ask the federal government to approve 141,207 H-1B visas in 2024? The truth is simpler: Importing cheaper, compliant labor remains the easiest way for corporate leadership to cut costs, pad bonuses, and build bigger homes in Southlake—while American workers pay the price.
Pax Americana is an American culture advocate, multidisciplinary designer, and software developer in Dallas, Texas.
