ROOKE: Big Tech Broke The Social Contract And American Workers Haven’t Forgotten

Interesting american workers, big tech, bill clinton, center for immigration studies, h 1b visa program, immigration, middle class, silicon valley admin August 26, 2026 0 Comments

ROOKE: Big Tech Broke The Social Contract And American Workers Haven’t Forgotten

At the heart of the legal immigration debate is a broken social contract between Silicon Valley and the middle class.

Americans have become increasingly frustrated with the wave of legal immigration brought into the U.S. to replace American workers. This primarily started in the tech industry, where the pipeline for middle-class Americans to access the American Dream was first removed.

Americans designed and built the first personal computers in the 70s and 80s. By 1993, Mosaic rolled out its internet browser for Windows and Macintosh, connecting the world to the internet. Americans had successfully created the tech boom that hasn’t slowed down since. Middle-class Americans thought this line of work would be the wave of the future. They pushed their children into tech specialties, telling them that if they worked hard, they could be the next generation of innovators.

This was the unwritten contract. Our children would focus less on economics, medicine, and other specialties, with the promise that the tech industry would fulfill its end by hiring them upon graduation. Sadly, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, creating an annual 65,000 visa cap allowing foreign workers to replace the middle class.

Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder and Anduril CEO, claimed to have observed H-1B visa abuse in Silicon Valley, calling it a scam that replaces U.S. workers with foreign labor, during an interview on the Shaun Ryan Show in February 2025.

“Of course there is so much H-1B abuse. You would not believe what I saw when I was in Silicon Valley. It is insane. It’s obviously a program to replace U.S. workers with, basically, slave labor that can’t ever escape,” he said.

Computer-related occupations accounted for only 26 percent of H-1Bs in 1995 but almost doubled to 42 percent in 1996, according to the Center for Migration Studies paper published in the Sage Journal.

The demand for foreign labor wasn’t spontaneously created by Congress. The information and communications technology industry (ICT) lobbied for it.

“The ICT industry has been the dominant user of the H-1B program over the past two decades,” the paper stated. “The major source of these workers in turn has been India. In 2000, 49 percent of all approved H-1B petitions were for Indian citizens, and by 2015, that figure had increased to 71 percent.” (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

Everyone from Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Facebook (now META), Oracle, Intel, and Qualcomm employed substantial numbers of H-1B workers. And they wanted more.

“ICT firms began to use the program heavily, and the annual limit became a constraint. Starting in the mid-1990s, therefore, ICT firms began working to raise the H-1B cap. Harris Miller, a professional lobbyist with expertise in immigration, was hired as president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) in 1995. A new business association, American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), was established with financial support from prominent ICT firms and designed to focus specifically on skilled immigration,” the paper stated.

Former President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party solicited help from ICT firms for his 1996 reelection campaign. At the time, there weren’t any anti-immigration organizations large enough to fight back against the growing access the tech industry had to the federal government through its political action committee, TechNet. This wasn’t just a Democratic Party issue. Republicans are just as much to blame.

By the early 2000s, Americans were being replaced en masse, and ICT lobbying firms continued their march to raise the cap on how many foreign workers could be granted U.S. visas.

In just 33 years, the U.S. tech industry went from using raw American talent to build the internet to casting them aside in favor of cheaper foreign labor.

Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, opined on the increasingly hostile relationship between Americans and tech, arguing that a middle ground must be found before it’s too late.

“Tech bros need to remember that they exist within a nation that has a people, not a blank economic zone,” Taylor wrote. “Middle class America needs to remember that national strength comes from economic and technological strength.”

“This is a careful synthesis between these that we must strike,” he added.

But he’s missing a very important fact here. It wasn’t the middle class that broke the social contract. The tech industry, with its greed and clear lack of loyalty to Americans who made it, did. The middle class was more than happy to continue bolstering the tech industry. It was excited about the advancements in technology, and especially about being a part of its rise. However, what Taylor and the rest of the “tech bros” are asking is that Americans ignore the betrayal and support it anyway. They want the middle class to continue to lose out to foreign workers without complaint. But that just isn’t going to happen anymore. (ROOKE: Trump Administration Takes Big Bite Of Immigration Apple With $103,265 Fee)

If the tech industry is worried about how the growing discontent among Americans will affect its ability to grow, then it needs to take a clear-eyed look at what caused the divide. The success of data centers, social media, and AI all revolves around their desire to fix the relationship between tech and the middle class. Any call to action should start with a renewed social contract. One that benefits American workers and doesn’t leave them training their replacements.

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