Despite stints at Google and Cisco and two years of job hunting, Mary can no longer compete in a job market saturated with foreign-born H-1B visa holders. "I had experience. I should have walked right into these corporate jobs, but I didn't. Why? Because Silicon Valley is flooded with people who work for two-thirds of the price, or even half price," said Mary, who asked to be identified only by her first name.
U.S. tech workers like Mary are at the center of a battle brewing in Washington, D.C., over reforming the troubled H-1B visa program, which is designed to fill highly skilled positions when qualified American workers can't be found. The controversy pits tough-on-immigration Republicans and some Democrats against the most formidable of opponents - Big Tech, the primary beneficiary of a program considered by critics to be little more than a pipeline of cheap labor.
In the last few decades, the California dream has gone global as U.S. tech firms have filled their ranks and C-suites with employees born abroad. Intel is no longer the company of its founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, but of Malaysian-born Lip-Bu Tan, its CEO since March 2025. Microsoft is led by Satya Nadella; Alphabet Inc. by Sundar Pichai; Adobe by Shantanu Narayen; IBM by Arvind Krishna; YouTube by Neal Mohan; and T-Mobile US by Srinivas Gopalan - all of whom were born in India.
All told, a remarkable two-thirds of the Valley's nearly 400,000 tech jobs are now held by those born abroad, according to a 2025 report from the think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. Today, more tech workers were born in India (23%) and China (18%) combined than in the U.S. (34%).
Low-Cost Talent
The influx of low-cost Asian talent has clearly helped fuel profits in one of America's most influential sectors. But there is a downside to this tech boom - the sidelining of U.S. workers thanks to the H-1B visa program that's no longer working as intended. Created in 1990, the federal program has morphed into a vehicle for employers, particularly in the nation's tech centers, to recruit much cheaper foreign labor at the expense of U.S. tech workers, according to Harvard economist George J. Borjas.
While the H-1B program spans multiple industries, it's overwhelmingly concentrated in tech. Last year, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy, and Google were the biggest visa users, with Amazon alone recording more than 13,000 applications. These companies find the savings from hiring foreign workers hard to resist. The job of software developer, for instance, accounts for 38% of all H-1B visa workers, according to a 2026 paper by Borjas. And these foreign software developers earn about 30% less than their U.S. counterparts, the economist estimates.
Since many of these tech jobs pay six figures, the savings quickly add up. Borjas estimates that companies, on average, save nearly $100,000 per worker over six years by hiring an H-1B worker rather than an American. The arrangement "redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants," Borjas wrote in 2016. That, in turn, helps account for the soaring stock prices of Big Tech since the 2008 financial crash.
Tribalism At Play?
Critics say favoritism has also contributed to foreign dominance of the tech sector. After foreign-born employees take on leadership roles, including CEO, they sometimes attract and hire more foreigners by tapping their own professional and social networks.
Kevin Lynn, executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, argues that "professionalism doesn't exist in these IT departments anymore," adding that "when you look at the hiring, it becomes very tribal; It's really India versus the rest of the world."
