The H-1B visa program and offshore “innovation centers” are replacing workers who built the modern digital world, according to a corporate tech insider. The author, a multidisciplinary designer and software developer in Dallas, Texas, argues that the program has created a workplace disaster by compromising security, degrading software quality, and crushing job prospects for American workers.
The author explains that after COVID-19, the number of Americans on their left and right has steadily dropped, while offshore offices multiply and foreign workers arrive under visas. These workers are not doing low-stakes tasks but building internal portals for insurance companies, managing databases storing medical records, and writing code behind bank and utility apps.
The result is that everyday American services— airlines, grocery chains, utilities—deploy software that barely works. The root cause lies in boardrooms across the Fortune 500: 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?
The author describes a pattern where H-1B hires climb the ladder to director or vice president by finding “inefficiencies,” which usually means firing Americans. They then push 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 shutters the American division and replaces 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.
The numbers paint an even darker picture. 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.
The author concludes that America is not obligated to subsidize its own replacement. We don’t need to accept a corporate-designed future in which our industries no longer employ us and the products no longer serve us. The American middle class built the modern technology economy. It should not be pushed aside so that executives can chase savings that hollow out the country one layoff at a time.
