The Real Correction: End the H-1B, Force the Reckoning
- Rich Washburn
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. It’s not.
We’ve spent 25 years watching American companies train foreign talent, outsource their own innovation, and then cry labor shortage when they realized they can’t find skilled workers at home. Newsflash: you can’t find them because you stopped building them.
I know because I was there. I spent months in India during the dot-com boom, training my replacements. Not metaphorically — literally. These people were brilliant. PhDs, multiple degrees, sharp as hell. They weren’t the villains. They were the result. The system created them because American corporations made it cheaper to build talent overseas than to invest in it here.
The Scam We Fell For
The whole thing was dressed up as “globalization.” What it really was? A short-term profit scheme that gutted domestic expertise and sold out
American workers for better quarterly numbers.
And now those same companies want sympathy because they’re “dependent” on H-1B visas? Please.
That dependency is self-inflicted. It’s the tech version of the 2008 banker bailout — except this time, the bailout comes in the form of imported talent instead of taxpayer money. And you know what happens when you keep bailing people out?They never fix the system.
Iceland Got It Right
Look back at 2008. Iceland told the banks, “Nope. You’re not too big to fail. You’re going to fail. You earned it.”And guess what? They bounced back faster than anyone else.
That’s the playbook. You don’t fix a broken system by propping it up. You fix it by forcing a reset.
The Hard Reset
So yeah — I’m saying it.End the H-1B program. Not freeze. Not reform. End it.
Send everyone home, not out of hate, not out of xenophobia, but because it’s the only way to make the people who caused this clean it up.
You want a real skills revolution? Fine. Take away the crutch. Let corporate America feel the pain it’s been exporting for decades.
When their engineering teams are hollow, when their projects stall, when their innovation pipeline dries up — they’ll finally have the same sense of urgency they had back when they offshored everything.
They’ll scramble. They’ll adapt. They’ll train.Because this time, they’ll have no choice but to fix their own mess. That’s how market correction works. You don’t get moral evolution without economic consequence.
The Nature of the Beast
And spare me the “we can’t do that, it’ll hurt the economy” talk. So did every other market correction that ever worked.This is the Bud Light moment for Big Tech and Big Corp.
You poke the public long enough, you get slapped. You betray your own workforce long enough, you lose it. You ignore national loyalty long enough, you force a reckoning.
It’s the scorpion and the turtle all over again — it’s their nature.But that doesn’t mean we let them sting us over and over and call it “the cost of doing business.”
You deal with the nature of the beast by building better walls and stronger consequences.That’s what this freeze — no, this termination — does.
It says: you broke it, you pay for it. You trained the world, now train your country. You exported the future, now rebuild it here.
The Real Conversation
This isn’t political — it’s consequential.I don’t care if you’re left, right, or somewhere in the pragmatic middle.The question isn’t “Should immigrants be here?” It’s “Why did our companies abandon us in the first place?”
And the answer’s simple: greed.
So let’s stop pretending that the fix is compassion for corporate dependency. You want compassion? Great.Start with the Americans who were left behind.
And when Big Tech starts crying that they “can’t innovate” without foreign labor, hand them a mirror.Tell them: You built this. Now you get to rebuild it — the right way.
End the program. Force the correction. Let the market feel the consequence. That’s how you rebuild a nation — not by outsourcing accountability, but by bringing it home.
Key Data & References
H‑1B visa approval & application volumes
In Fiscal Year 2024 ~ 400,000 H-1B visa applications were approved. Pew Research Center+2USCIS+2
Of those, ~65 % (~258,196) were renewals, and ~35 % (~141,207) were initial employment approvals. Pew Research Center
In FY 2023 there were ~ 780,884 registrations — illustrating demand far above the published cap. WSM Immigration
Denial rates have dropped: e.g., down to ~2 % for initial applications in 2022, compared to ~24 % in 2018. Pew Research Center
Source countries: ~73 % of approved H-1B workers in 2023 were born in India; ~12 % in China. Pew Research Center
Off-shoring / outsourcing trends in U.S. business
~66 % of U.S. companies outsourced at least one department. Forbes
For 2025 there’s a statistic that U.S. companies outsource over 300,000 jobs every year. DemandSage
One in five U.S. companies admitted in 2024 to replacing laid-off U.S. workers with offshore workers. Synergistic IT
High-skill jobs are also being off-shored: software dev, engineering, analytics, etc. TRC Global Mobility, Inc.
Case study: Iceland as a corrective model
Post-crisis, Iceland reduced its gross public debt from ~92 % of GDP at the peak to ~35 % by 2018. IMF+2OUP Academic+2
By 2017, GDP per capita was ~7 % above its pre-crisis 2007 peak. OUP Academic+1
Iceland made bold corrections (banks failed, capital controls, restructuring) rather than bailouts. Knowledge at Wharton+1
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