Supporters of the H-1B outsourcing program should admit the “gross abuse” within the program if they want it to survive growing public hostility, a West Coast investor told an evasive Axios journalist.
“Sometimes you’ve got to say, ‘You know what, that was gross abuse,’” said Chamath Palihapitiya, an immigrant from the Sinhalese community in Sri Lanka, which is not part of India. As the reporter tried to evade and change the subject, Palihapitiya insisted:
I think that there’s been a lot of abuse in some of these foundational programs, and I think if you’re going to set them on a right course, we have to be honest about the abuses… You need to stop and to tourniquet the bleeding, so that you can reestablish trust with the American population at large.
Palihapitiya is a long-standing supporter of the H-1B program, which provides some skilled workers to the start-up firms funded by his investor peers in Silicon Valley. For example, he was one of the first founders of FWD.us, which is the primary pro-migration lobby for more migration.
But the H-1B program is increasingly at risk because Americans — and some of their GOP politicians — increasingly recognize the elite exploitation and ethnic discrimination within the Fortune 500 companies and subcontractors that employ the vast majority of the 1 million mixed-skill population of H-1B workers and their spouses. The arbitrage is also growing in U.S. universities and non-profits.
Breitbart News has posted many articles about how Indian managers and C-Suite executives exploit the many visa programs to quietly sell jobs held by American professionals. The executives also embezzle company wealth via featherbedding, salary kickbacks, and self-dealing contracts via the complex rules in the H-1B, H4EAD, L-1, J-1, OPT, B1/B2 visa programs.
The establishment media hides the damage to white-collar Americans and the professional class, partly because their owners support the visa programs. Moreover, mid-level editors mostly hire reporters who prefer to focus on safe topics such as the concerns of Haitian migrants.
President Donald Trump has talked up the need for reform, and his deputies have spotlighted the problems. But the administration has not stopped or significantly curbed the investors’ use of the counterproductive visa programs.
“For the last 15 or 20 years, what’s been happening?” Palihapitiya said:
You have [many H-1B] applications from a handful of [arbitrage] companies, 20,000 slots open up, 800,000 applications flood in… [But] We should be attracting the best of the best of the best… But we should also make it fair, so that the best of the best of the best — who have been getting [excluded] for the last five years because a handful of companies in certain countries have abused this [visa] system — [can get jobs].
Palihapitiya is not Indian but is an ethnic Sinhalese from Sri Lanka, an independent island close to India. That means he is not part of the ethnic Indian network that dominates and defends the H-1B program that is used by India’s government to extract vast wealth from Americans. But he looks similar to an Indian, so he is also getting blamed, he added:
There’s a lot of people who look at me and say “That guy’s part of the problem!” You can see it in the comments on X, and I’m like, “Wow, me?”
The unnerved Axios reporter quickly tried to blame the public opposition on President Donald Trump and his populist movement, saying: “But do you think that’s partially because of the rhetoric that’s come from D.C.?
“No,” said Palihapitiya, vehemently, adding:
That’s been building up for decades, because [Americans] see the abuses on the ground. They [American professionals] see the people that show up [at work], and they’re like, “Wait a minute, this person is not smarter than me, all I can see is wage suppression.”
We have a responsibility for the people that are here [Americans, visa workers, and legalized migrants] and paying into the system, to answer their questions honestly. You can’t stipulate and move on to everything. You can’t. Sometimes you’ve got to say, “You know what, that was gross abuse.”
Unsurprisingly, the Axios reporter did not ask Palihapitiya for details of the corruption.
Other members of the technocratic elite openly describe the harm caused by the visa programs and migration.
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