H-1B: America’s “Scam” That Built Its Tech Empire

(and why cutting it is like shooting yourself in the foot)

The Opening Blow

So now they call it a scam.

The H-1B visa—the very program that quietly powered America’s rise in tech—is suddenly the villain of the story. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bellows about “fixing the system.” Trump 2.0 wants to rip it apart. Social media warriors clap as if Silicon Valley were built on Friday rallies and red, white, and blue slogans.

Here’s the joke, though: if H-1B is a scam, then Silicon Valley itself is the greatest scam America ever pulled off. Because without it, there would be no Google as we know it, no Microsoft, no IBM renaissance, and no Indra Nooyi reshaping PepsiCo.

The Data That Doesn’t Lie

Numbers are quieter than politicians, but they don’t bluff:

• Between October 2022 and September 2023, Indians accounted for 72% of nearly 400,000 H-1Bs. Not charity – just America filling a need it couldn’t fill at home.
• Median H-1B salary? $123,600. Compare that to the American median of $45,760. So much for “cheap labor.”
• Amazon alone filed for 11,000+ visas in 2023. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Infosys, Cognizant—the line goes on. Not because they’re feeling generous, but because the local talent pool isn’t enough.

This isn’t job theft. It’s life support.

The Human Pipeline
The truth has names and faces, not just charts:

• Jensen Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, and raised in Kentucky and Oregon. Oregon State and Stanford shaped him, the H-1B kept him, and he built NVIDIA—the engine of AI and gaming.
• Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room apartment in Chennai. His first computer? At IIT Kharagpur. The H-1B let him stay after Stanford. Today, he runs Google.
• Satya Nadella left Hyderabad with a cricket bat philosophy and ended up reinventing Microsoft. The H-1B was his bridge.
• Jay Chaudhry grew up in a Himalayan village without electricity. From IIT to Harvard, through the H-1B visa, he forged Zscaler into a $ 20 billion cybersecurity empire.
• Indra Nooyi landed in New Haven with barely enough for a winter coat. She completed her MBA at Yale and went on to work on the H-1B visa. She went on to head PepsiCo as its CEO, one of the finest corporate stories in America.

Take H-1B out of the story, and you erase them from America’s script.

The “Protection” Paradox

Politicians say they’re protecting American jobs. What they’re really doing is handcuffing innovation.

The uncomfortable truth? The U.S. doesn’t graduate enough STEM talent. Universities themselves rely on international students to keep labs running and discoveries flowing. Shut the H-1B pipeline, and you don’t protect workers—you choke the system that makes new jobs possible. This is what prompted Dr. Michio Kaku to state, “The secret weapon that keeps us at the forefront of innovation and scientific progress … is the H-1B. That is our secret weapon … the H-1B is the genius visa.”

The Domino Effect

We’ve seen this movie before:

• Tighten H-1B, and U.S. companies won’t hire more Americans. They shift jobs to destinations like India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and Canada…
• Restrict visas, and the flow of patents slows. Startups thin out. Venture capital looks elsewhere.
• Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies that developed vaccines had hired 3,310 scientists through H-1B visas in the decade preceding it. Without them, America’s vaccine response would have been slower, perhaps even more costly.

Starve the pipeline, and you starve the future.

Also Read: A guide to the USA

Reality vs. Rhetoric

The “scam” isn’t H-1B. The scam is pretending America can survive without it.

Built by Immigrants: The Fortune 500 Mirror

Here’s the kicker:

• 46% of Fortune 500 companies—231 giants—were founded by immigrants or their children.
• Together, they generated $8.6 trillion in revenue. If that were a country, it’d be the world’s third-largest economy.
• They employ 15.4 million people worldwide—more than the entire population of Pennsylvania.

This isn’t theory. This is America’s growth story in plain numbers.

The Closing Blow

And yet, the very people who built this miracle are being painted as job stealers.

Cut the H-1B pipeline, and Silicon Valley won’t die—it will simply move. To Bangalore. To Berlin. To Shanghai. To Singapore. America didn’t build its tech empire alone. It borrowed brains. It borrowed dreams. 

It’s called the H-1B. To kill it now? That’s killing the goose that laid Silicon Valley’s golden egg—with full awareness of what’s inside.

Presented by IMFS—India’s most trusted study abroad guide since 1997

Authored by K. P. Singh
Mentor | Educationist | Founder – IMFS
🌍 Empowering the Global Indian Student
www.imfs.co.in