The Man Who Founded Big Tech’s H-1B Lobby Just Admitted on Camera What American Workers Knew All Along

Silicon Valley has spent twenty years telling displaced American tech workers they were imagining the abuse.

Now the billionaire who helped build the H-1B lobbying machine is going public with something that should end that lie for good.

What Chamath Palihapitiya admitted when an Axios reporter tried to shut the conversation down is something Big Tech has paid millions to keep off television.

The FWD.us Founder Calls the System He Built Corrupt

Palihapitiya is not some outsider critic.

He is a Sri Lankan immigrant who came to the United States on an H-1B visa, became a billionaire venture capitalist, and was one of the founding members of FWD.us – the primary Silicon Valley lobby that has spent years pushing Congress for more foreign worker visas.

When Dan Primack of Axios tried to brush past the problems in the program – offering to "stipulate the abuses" and move on – Palihapitiya refused.

"It's not as easy as saying stipulate," he told Primack. "Let me explain to you what's happening."

What happened next was the kind of moment Washington, D.C. doesn't forgive.

Palihapitiya told the Axios audience that the H-1B lottery has been monopolized by a handful of outsourcing companies – firms that flood the system with hundreds of thousands of applications for low-skill, low-wage workers and crowd out genuine talent from everywhere else.

He described a program flooded with applications from a handful of companies – 20,000 slots open while 800,000 applications pour in – leaving the engineers and scientists the visa was designed for with no real shot at getting through.

The result is a program designed to bring in the best engineers and scientists on earth that now functions as a cheap labor pipeline for Indian outsourcing conglomerates.

Palihapitiya said the abuse is so systematic that he doubts he could even get an H-1B today under the rules the industry has engineered to serve itself.

"I sure as shit would never have gotten an H-1B in the way that the program works today," he said.

What American Workers Already Knew

This is not a revelation to the American engineers and IT professionals who spent two decades watching it happen in real time.

Infosys paid $34 million to settle a visa fraud case after federal prosecutors documented what they called "systemic visa fraud and abuse of immigration processes."

Tata paid $30 million to resolve a wage dispute involving roughly 13,000 foreign workers who were forced to sign their U.S. tax refund checks back over to the company.

Heritage Foundation researchers documented how Indian outsourcing giants Tata, Infosys, and Wipro collectively account for a disproportionate share of H-1B sponsorships – not to fill genuine skill gaps, but to suppress American wages and offshore white-collar jobs.

The American workers who saw it firsthand weren't imagining it and they weren't racist for saying so.

Palihapitiya confirmed every word.

"They see the people that show up," he said of American workers, "and they're like, wait a minute, this person is not smarter than me. All I can see is wage suppression."

The establishment media spent two decades calling those workers xenophobes.

Palihapitiya just validated them.

Trump Was Already Moving

While Axios reporters were dismissing H-1B critics as anti-immigrant reactionaries, Trump was already acting.

In September 2025, he signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions – the most dramatic overhaul of the program in decades.

The administration paired the fee with a reform act that raised wage floors, tightened non-displacement rules to protect American workers, and restructured the lottery to prioritize the highest-paid, most-skilled applicants.

The outsourcing lobby screamed.

A coalition of 20 Democratic attorneys general filed suit, led by California's Rob Bonta, calling the fee "devastating" and claiming it would harm hospitals and schools.

What Bonta did not mention was that those same hospitals and schools had been using the broken H-1B system to hire cheaper foreign labor instead of paying market wages to American workers.

DHS fired back, calling the legal challenges "blatant judicial activism dismantling President Trump's historic efforts for immigration reform."

Palihapitiya's admission hands Trump the one thing the reform effort has been missing – an insider validator.

A Silicon Valley billionaire who helped build the system just told America that the system is exactly as corrupt as Trump's voters always suspected.

The Axios reporter tried to change the subject.

Palihapitiya wouldn't let him.

"You can't stipulate and move on to everything," he said. "Sometimes you've got to say, 'You know what, that was gross abuse.'"

Sources:

• Neil Munro, "Silicon Valley Investor Declares 'Gross Abuse' in the H-1B Program," Breitbart, June 27, 2026.
• Peter Skerry, "The H-1B Visa Needs Drastic Reform to Put Americans First," Heritage Foundation.
• Staff, "Trump's 2025 H-1B Crackdown: $100K Fee and Reform Act," VisaVerge, December 2025.
• Staff, "New Data Show How Firms Like Infosys and Tata Abuse the H-1B Program," Economic Policy Institute, February 2015.