Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat no less, has just teamed up with a Republican to challenge Big Tech’s addiction to foreign labor over American talent, as Breitbart reports.
In a bold move, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) have fired off letters to the CEOs of 10 corporate giants, demanding answers about their reliance on H-1B visa workers from India and China while skilled American tech workers face layoffs and unemployment.
This bipartisan duo, with Grassley chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee and Durbin as the ranking Democrat, isn’t mincing words about the growing backlash against the H-1B program amid rising joblessness among young American graduates.
The letters, dispatched on Sept. 25, 2025, landed on the desks of heavyweights like Amazon—the top user of H-1B workers—along with Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Walmart, and others, including Cognizant, Deloitte, JP Morgan Chase, and Tata Consultancy.
These senators are pressing for responses by October 2025, clearly fed up with watching American tech talent get sidelined while roughly 1.2 million foreign workers hold white-collar jobs through the H-1B program—jobs that young American families desperately need.
Adding fuel to the fire, Walmart recently faced allegations of an Indian executive funneling a subcontract to an H-1B firm run by fellow countrymen in exchange for kickbacks, raising eyebrows about corporate ethics in visa usage.
Federal data paints a grim picture: unemployment is climbing among American tech graduates, even as Big Tech continues to file H-1B petitions for thousands of foreign workers while slashing domestic jobs.
Former President Donald Trump’s recent proclamation didn’t shy away from the numbers, noting that foreign STEM workers in the U.S. ballooned from 1.2 million in 2000 to 2.5 million by 2019, while the foreign share in computer and math jobs jumped from 17.7% to 26.1% in the same span.
Trump also called out the national security risks tied to H-1B abuses, pointing to law enforcement findings of visa fraud, money laundering, and other shady dealings by outsourcing firms reliant on the program.
Trump’s earlier move to slap a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa recipients—though unclear if it’s a one-time or yearly charge—has split opinions, with some seeing it as a half-step toward curbing low-wage labor imports.
Democratic investor Reed Hastings chimed in on Sept. 21, 2025, via social media, saying, “Trump’s $100k per year tax is a great solution.” But let’s not get too cozy—Hastings might like the price tag, though it’s hardly a full fix when millions of American jobs are still on the line.
Meanwhile, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), an Indian immigrant, blasted the fee, arguing it would “completely upend research” in her state and beyond, though one wonders if protecting American workers shouldn’t take precedence over imported talent.
On the legislative front, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) has tossed his hat in with a bill to hike wage requirements for H-1B holders and ditch the lottery for a bidding system—finally, a nod to merit over chance.
Contrast that with Silicon Valley’s FWD.us lobby group, which in a January report pushed to raise the H-1B cap and carve out exemptions for certain immigrants, a move that smells more like corporate greed than concern for American workers.
It’s high time policymakers stop bowing to Big Tech’s wishlist and start prioritizing the homegrown talent getting crushed under the weight of a visa system ripe for reform—let’s hope Grassley and Durbin’s letters are just the start of a long-overdue reckoning.
