71% of all approved H-1B visas go to workers born in a single country.
Out of 399,395 approved petitions, 283,397 went to workers born in India. China is a distant second at 11.7%. The Philippines barely registers at 1.3%. Every other nation on Earth combined fills just 16% of the slots.
This isn't what a "global talent pipeline" looks like. This is what a labor arbitrage scheme looks like when you dress it up in immigration policy language.
Large consulting and outsourcing firms file thousands of petitions at a time, cycling through workers paid at or near the program's wage floors while American workers in the same roles are passed over or replaced entirely. The H-1B was sold to the public as a way to recruit the best and brightest from around the world. In practice, it operates as a bilateral labor export agreement disguised as a universal one.
The structural flaw is obvious: unlike green cards, there are no meaningful per-country caps on H-1B approvals. So when one country's outsourcing industry builds an entire business model around gaming the system, nothing stops it from swallowing the program whole.
If policymakers were serious about reform, they'd start with a simple question: how did a visa designed for global talent end up as a jobs pipeline for one country's IT services industry?
Out of 399,395 approved petitions, 283,397 went to workers born in India. China is a distant second at 11.7%. The Philippines barely registers at 1.3%. Every other nation on Earth combined fills just 16% of the slots.
This isn't what a "global talent pipeline" looks like. This is what a labor arbitrage scheme looks like when you dress it up in immigration policy language.
Large consulting and outsourcing firms file thousands of petitions at a time, cycling through workers paid at or near the program's wage floors while American workers in the same roles are passed over or replaced entirely. The H-1B was sold to the public as a way to recruit the best and brightest from around the world. In practice, it operates as a bilateral labor export agreement disguised as a universal one.
The structural flaw is obvious: unlike green cards, there are no meaningful per-country caps on H-1B approvals. So when one country's outsourcing industry builds an entire business model around gaming the system, nothing stops it from swallowing the program whole.
If policymakers were serious about reform, they'd start with a simple question: how did a visa designed for global talent end up as a jobs pipeline for one country's IT services industry?
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