By Josiah Hale
The propaganda mouthpieces of the national media refuse to report the real numbers. Hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs that once belonged to American workers have been filled by H-1B visa holders and other foreign nationals. These are not minimum-wage positions. They are software, engineering, and technical roles that pay well above the national median and could have lifted millions of American families out of economic struggle.
Roughly 700,000 people are currently working in the United States on H-1B visas. The annual statutory cap is only 85,000 new visas, yet total approved petitions routinely exceed 400,000 per year once extensions and transfers are included. Top sponsors include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and major Indian outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys. In recent years, one company alone received more than 25,000 H-1B approvals while reducing its U.S. workforce by 27,000. Others have followed the same pattern: large H-1B intakes paired with simultaneous layoffs of American employees.
White House data has documented the trend. The share of IT workers on H-1B visas rose sharply over two decades while unemployment among recent computer science and computer engineering graduates climbed higher than rates for many non-STEM majors. American workers have been required, in documented cases, to train their foreign replacements before being shown the door. These are not abstract statistics. They represent concrete opportunities denied to citizens who were told for years that high-skill immigration was only filling jobs Americans could not or would not do.
Democratic leaders and their aligned networks have long supported expanding these programs and weakening border enforcement. Open-border policies increase the pool of available foreign labor while simultaneously expanding the pool of potential future voters. The connection is not subtle. When high-wage jobs are reserved for non-citizens and the border remains porous, the political class gains both cheaper labor for corporate donors and demographic changes that favor one party. The same outlets that spent years downplaying border numbers and H-1B displacement now treat any discussion of these figures as xenophobic. They are not. They are arithmetic.
Americans are not against temporary, truly specialized foreign talent when genuine shortages exist. They are against a system that has been systematically gamed to replace domestic workers, suppress wages in key sectors, and transfer opportunity abroad. The midterms will not reverse the pattern unless voters demand that every job opened to a foreign national first be offered, in good faith, to an American. The numbers are public. The silence from the major networks is not accidental.
References
- White House Fact Sheet on H-1B Reform and American Worker Displacement
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/ (search H-1B fact sheet, September 2025) - U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – H-1B Employer Data Hub and Annual Reports
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub - Department of Labor – Foreign Labor Certification H-1B Data
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance
Josiah Hale writes for WeAre-Americans.com.
