Indentured by Design: How the H1B Program is Tearing America Apart
"Patriotism cannot develop in members of a class that is being oppressed. Therefore, the protection of the working class is necessary, as a country must be worth living in, to be worth dying for."
— Theodore Roosevelt
Today, the United States of America faces a shortage of technical talent. As a supposed solution to this unique problem, the H-1B visa program was proposed and inaugurated. Unfortunately, the H-1B program has been captured almost entirely by a small number of labor-arbitrage firms whose business model is to place workers at client sites at wages materially below what the same work commands on the open market. It ties a worker's legal residence in this country to the continued goodwill of a single employer, which is the precise structural definition of indenture, and which is why it suppresses wages for the American and the visa holder alike. And it has produced, in a handful of the largest technology companies in the world, an outcome nobody in Washington intended and almost nobody will discuss: the reconstitution inside American workplaces of a hereditary social hierarchy that American civil rights law was never written to see.
For nearly the entire history of the modern H-1B cap, selection among applicants was a random lottery. It wasn’t a points system, a skills assessment, a ranking by salary, degree, publication record, or even the demonstrated scarcity of the skill in question. It was based on a draw. This is the load-bearing proof that the argument that H-1Bs bring America the "best and brightest" is a deceitful lie. A program that allocates 85,000 slots by random draw among a pool inflated far beyond that number is by definition a raffle. Whatever its winners' individual qualifications (and many are genuinely excellent, a point we will return to) the program was not constructed to find them, and any firm that filed enough registrations was mathematically favored regardless of whom it was filing for.
The Body Shops
Look at who actually uses this program. Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys together filed more than 21,000 H-1B petitions in 2026 alone, roughly 27 percent of all filings. Their average salary for those workers runs under $105,000, close to 40% below what the major technology firms pay for comparable roles. For every dollar a Cognizant H-1B worker earns, a Google H-1B worker earns about $1.78. Despite the fact that the work itself is not meaningfully different, the wage in fact is. At the state level, this concentration becomes even starker. In Texas between January 2020 and December 2025, Cognizant hired 50,666 H-1B visa workers and Infosys 45,323. Oracle, an actual technology company that builds actual products, came third at 11,603, less than a quarter of Cognizant's figure. Tesla managed 5,307.
These firms do not principally build products. They place billable bodies at client sites. Banks, insurers, telecoms, and retailers contract with them precisely so that the labor arrangement sits at arm's length: the client company gets the cost reduction without ever appearing on a petition. Bloomberg's reporting in 2025 described the resulting structure accurately as a shadow workforce that depresses wages across the industry. And these firms have historically concentrated their filings at Level I and Level II of the Department of Labor's prevailing wage scale, the entry-level tiers. These firms classify the position low, pay the corresponding "prevailing" wage lawfully, and undercut the domestic market while remaining in technical compliance the entire time. To all those who argue for H-1B visas on the basis of America’s labor shortage, this argument is unabsorbable.
Here’s why: A genuine shortage of a scarce skill would produce rising wages. But what the H-1B program has produced in the outsourcing segment is the opposite, which reveals that the binding constraint was never a shortage of engineers, but the price of hiring and paying those engineers.
Indenture by Design
But the problem is actually much deeper, and far more structural. An H-1B worker's lawful presence in the United States is tethered to a specific sponsoring employer. If you lose the job, a 60-day grace period starts ticking down, with a proposed rule now on the table to eliminate even that. A worker in that position can’t credibly threaten to quit. They cannot organize without risking their entire livelihood. They cannot negotiate from any position but weakness, that is individual bargaining. And they cannot report a wage violation, a safety problem, or a hostile manager without contemplating whether the complaint ends his family's residence in the country. Every one of those disabilities is effectively a wage suppressant, and this suppressant does not stop at the visa holder. Let’s say you are employed in a workplace containing a substantial population of workers who structurally cannot bargain. This is a workplace where nobody bargains effectively, citizen or not. The American engineer sitting at the next desk over is not competing against a foreign worker. He is competing against a contract term, a contract term that makes his colleague unable to say no, and he will in turn lose that competition every time, because no free worker can underbid one who is not free.
Train Your Replacement
There are two perfect examples of this problem materializing: First in Southern California Edison (SCE) in 2014, and then at Disney World shortly thereafter. SCE laid off roughly 500 information technology workers, members of the labor union IBEW Local 47 among them, and brought in replacements supplied by outsourcing vendors. At Disney, about 250 IT employees were terminated, and their severance bonuses were conditioned on "continued satisfactory performance," which in practice meant thirty days of job shadowing, thirty days of parallel working, and thirty days of monitoring, spent training the H-1B workers brought in by HCL and Cognizant to do their jobs. A man named Leo Perrero was among them, and described it to 60 Minutes, stating that never in his life had he imagined he could sit at his desk and have somebody flown in from another country to sit in that same chair and take over what he was doing. Dena Moore, laid off after ten years, applied for more than 150 other positions at Disney and was hired for none of them. Perrero and Moore sued Disney, HCL, and Cognizant in federal court in January of 2016, arguing the companies had colluded to make false statements on visa applications, specifically the attestation that hiring the foreign workers would not displace similarly employed American workers. The Department of Labor quickly opened investigations, and Senators Bernie Sanders (Independent) and Jim Inhofe (Republican), who agree on almost nothing else, jointly demanded an inquiry into the case.
The lawsuits were then dismissed on motions to dismiss, and the workers got nothing. The outcome here, however, is precisely the point, and I think it demonstrates a much more structural issue. The law was not broken here, and that reality is the far more troubling conclusion. What the law has shown here, is that as it is currently interpreted and practiced, American workers in this situation have no meaningful forum or procedure, and they get no remedy that’s proportionate to the injury.
The Caste System Enters Tech
But here’s something that we can be certain that Washington DC will not touch: On June 30, 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing sued Cisco Systems and two of its managers under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and California's Fair Employment and Housing Act. The allegation there was that one of Cisco's engineers at its San Jose campus had been harassed, denied raises, denied two promotions, isolated, and reassigned, because he is Dalit, a member of the community India's caste order once designated as untouchable. His managers, the suit alleged, were dominant-caste Indians. When he reported one of them to human resources in 2016 for disclosing his caste to his colleagues, Cisco's position was that caste discrimination was not illegal in the United States. That conduct continued for two more years. It was the first time an American corporation had been sued for caste discrimination. And it would not be the last. In the wake of the filing, more than 250 Dalit workers from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and dozens of other firms came forward to report discrimination, bullying, ostracization, and harassment by dominant-caste colleagues. Thirty female Dalit engineers in Silicon Valley described the compounding within their workplaces of caste and sex discrimination. A 2018 survey of South Asians in the United States found that 67 percent of Dalits reported being treated unfairly at their American workplaces; two in three reported workplace discrimination, one in three at university, one in four physical or verbal assault. In February 2023 Seattle became the first American city to ban caste discrimination outright, and California's legislature took up SB 403. Cisco, having spent years denying caste was a protected category in the United States, eventually added it to its own list.
The scale of this, once tech workers actually spoke up, was larger than anybody had prepared for. Equality Labs, the Dalit civil rights organization that has tracked the issue since 2016, documented claims concentrated at Facebook (33), Cisco (24), Google (20), Microsoft (18), IBM (17), and Amazon (14), a company-by-company breakdown that Reuters and Bloomberg both later reported reflected the exact same pattern across the whole industry. Al Jazeera published an account from a Dalit engineer, writing under condition of anonymity, describing colleagues touching the back of a new Indian-origin hire to feel for the sacred thread worn by Brahmins. This has been conducted, just to be clear, inside American office buildings, to determine which trusted network a new employee belonged to before deciding how he would be treated.
The thirty female Dalit engineers who wrote to Silicon Valley in October 2020 did not describe caste bias as an isolated cruelty. In fact, networks of engineers from the dominant castes, they wrote, had replicated the old patterns of bias inside the United States by favoring their own peers in hiring, referrals, and performance reviews. Tech hiring runs overwhelmingly on referral; a candidate is far more likely to even be interviewed if a current employee vouches for him. A referral network organized around caste, university cohort, and regional ties from a specific Indian state is not merely unkind to the Dalit engineer standing outside it. It is in fact structurally invisible to the American engineer standing outside it too, for the exact reason. Neither man has the family temple, the university roll, or the surname that opens the door to him. TechEquity Collaborative's review of the Silicon Valley's technical workforce found that Americans of Indian descent hold roughly a quarter of technical roles there, drawn almost exclusively from the dominant castes, a concentration that a closed, birth-and-network hiring channel produces just as reliably whether the man locked outside it is a Dalit or alternatively, an American who has never heard of the caste system in his or her life. This is no longer a fringe issue. In 2026 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, hardly a nativist outlet, devoted an entire episode of its India-focused Grand Tamasha podcast to a new book titled Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians, and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, its own title placing the displaced American worker and the trapped Indian worker in the same sentence, because its reporting found them both to be casualties of the current order.
This is not a story about Indian workers being unfit. The victims here the Indians, and the perpetrators are Indians, who have unfortunately imported their hereditary hierarchy into American workplaces and operated there for years because American civil rights law has historically had no category for it, and American employers had no incentive to ever invent one. Why would they? The reader ought to ask themselves why this could ever operate in the first place. The answer is unfortunately simple: It has worked this way for so long because a large population of workers inside the aforementioned firms could not afford to complain about anything. A Dalit engineer on an H-1B who reports his manager for caste harassment is risking his status in America, his spouse's status, his children's education. The current visa system is entirely responsible for the conditions under which caste could be enforced inside an American corporation with impunity.
America should not be surprised when older and uglier hierarchies move into the space its own law has chosen to vacate. The NNA does not believe that honest, hard-working, and patriotic Americans of Indian descent are the problem. But we do believe that the guest worker program is the problem, and the remedy is less guest workers.
What Has Changed, and What Has Not
To the Trump administration's credit, the two most important structural reforms in the program's history landed in the last year. A presidential proclamation effective September 21th, 2025 imposed a $100,000 supplemental fee on most new cap-subject petitions for beneficiaries abroad requiring consular processing. More consequentially, the DHS finalized a rule on December 29th, 2025, effective February 27, 2026, replacing the random lottery system with wage-weighted selection. The Penn Wharton Budget Model's August 2026 analysis found these measures would raise the mean pay of selected registrants by between $7,551 and $18,799, and, critically, that most of that gain comes from the wage weighting. The same analysis projected that India's share of selections will fall from 66.8% to somewhere between 55.7-63.5%, with the doctorate share rising from 5.7% to 9.5%. The data reveals that the concentration was caused by a selection mechanism that rewarded volume at low-wage levels, and it corrects itself the moment wages were rewarded instead.
A Different Door
Asylum claims by Indian nationals in US immigration courts grew roughly eightfold between 2020 and 2023. A 2025 study by scholar Devesh Kapur, published through the Center for the Advanced Study of India, examined two decades of these claims by the language spoken by the claimant and found a striking divide. Between 2001 and 2022, Punjabi speakers filed 66% of all Indian asylum cases in US courts, compared with just 7% for Gujarati speakers, despite Punjabi speakers having the lowest average personal earnings of any Indian-origin group in the country, at $48,000, against $58,000 for Gujaratis. Punjabi speakers also succeeded at a markedly higher rate: 63% of their claims were approved, against 25% for Gujarati claimants.
The Indian government has, by the sworn admission of its own former intelligence contact in a New York federal courtroom, run a campaign of transnational repression against Sikh separatist activists in North America. Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen advocating for an independent Khalistan, was assassinated outside a Surrey gurdwara in June 2023. Three months later, Canada's prime minister accused the Indian state directly. In November of that year the US DoJ unsealed an indictment alleging an Indian government employee had directed a plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American Sikh, on American soil. In February of this year the Indian national who carried the money, Nikhil Gupta, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy. The FBI has described Pannun as targeted for transnational repression for nothing more than exercising his freedom of speech, and has separately warned other Sikh activists on American soil that they face comparable threats. A federal prosecutor's office does not use that language lightly, and a legal system built to distinguish real persecution from mere economic hardship should, in fact, be more receptive to a Sikh political claimant from Punjab than to an unrelated economic migrant from Gujarat. On the numbers, it plainly is.
The rest of the gap is exactly what this Program's border security section already anticipates: an intermediary industry that has learned to route economic migration through the one legal channel that guarantees a hearing rather than immediate removal. Reporting on irregular migration from Punjab describes a well-established network of paid agents charging migrants enormous sums to move them along land routes through Central America to the southern border, coaching them on what to say on arrival. Gujarat shows the same pattern in smaller scale — a wealthy, high-growth state whose labor market nonetheless fails to convert that growth into jobs for a large share of its own workforce, producing a smaller but real smuggling-facilitated outflow, which is why Gujarati claimants keep attempting the same route despite a legal system that correctly recognizes most of them do not meet the persecution standard and rejects three in four of them.
The Position
The New Nationalists of America hold, as stated in our Program, that guest-worker and training-visa programs must be restricted to genuine, demonstrated shortages, subject to prevailing-wage floors set high enough to remove any incentive to prefer foreign labor to domestic, that an employer must prove before a regional labor board seated with union representation that no qualified American exists for the role, and that the Labor Court must have explicit jurisdiction to prosecute employers who use a worker's immigration status as an instrument of coercion. We have no place for a rotating population of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers who are permitted to labor here for years, forbidden to bargain, unable to complain, ineligible to belong, and disposable on thirty days' notice, summoned by capital and abandoned by law, belonging fully to neither the country they left nor the one they were brought to. That arrangement hurts the American worker. It hurts the guest worker. And it creates a space inside American companies where the oldest hierarchies in the world can be enforced against human beings while American law looks the other way.
A country that cannot say who belongs has nothing to offer the immigrant it claims to welcome.
It is well past time to say it.
