Engineering Sovereignty and the Moral Failure of the H1B Regime

The Crisis

We are told there is an engineering shortage.
We are told the H1B visa system fills that gap.
We are told it imports brilliance and secures America’s dominance in technology.

But behind these platitudes is a betrayal. Not of xenophobia, but of purpose. Not of openness, but of stewardship. The H1B system as implemented is not a precision tool for attracting the rare genius. It is a blunt instrument of wage suppression, systemic decay, and corporate moral abdication.

The Lie of Strategic Skimming

The original justification for H1B was defensible: to attract the Einsteins, the Musks, the once-in-a-generation minds that no nation should turn away. This is not in dispute. Those minds rise to the top 5% of the wage scale almost by gravitational force. They do not undercut the domestic labor pool—they elevate it.

But they are not who fills the majority of H1B slots.

Instead, we see a bulk importation of mid-tier engineers—credentialed, compliant, and willing to work for 60–75% of the prevailing wage. This is not “strategic skimming.” It is economic displacement. The one creative master is replaced with twenty interchangeable executors. The result is not 20x output. It is fractionalization, demoralization, and the degradation of engineering as an honored path.

Commodification of the Creator Class

When companies use the H1B system to pad headcount with cheap labor, they reduce the engineer from creator to widget. This destroys not only the wage floor but the cultural expectation that engineering is an elite craft—worthy of respect, moral formation, and lifelong mastery.

The signal to the next generation is clear: “This field is saturated, underpaid, and globally fungible.”
Why endure the gauntlet of physics, mathematics, and long-form thought if the reward is being outbid by a labor-import pipeline optimized for cost containment?

The Corporate Abdication

This system indemnifies the most powerful companies in the world from confronting the damage done to the civic structures they rely upon. The same firms that cannot find domestic talent sit atop record profits, hoard cash, and do nothing to rebuild the education pipeline. They do not partner with schools. They do not fund apprenticeships. They do not mentor at scale. Instead, they externalize the cost of talent formation to foreign governments, then import the product.

This is not innovation. It is vampirism.

The Education Paradox

We lament the failure of the U.S. education system to produce world-class engineers, yet we strip it of all incentive to reform. As long as business can patch over the collapse with imported labor, there is no urgency to rebuild. Why reform high schools and universities if the pipeline can be bypassed entirely?

The education system rots, and we anesthetize the pain with H1B.
The wound festers, and we call it “competitiveness.”

Sovereignty in Engineering

A sovereign nation builds.
It does not rent.
It does not outsource its capacity to think, to innovate, or to repair what breaks.

Engineering is not typing. It is not assembly. It is theory made flesh, insight made infrastructure, abstraction made power. To relinquish this to the lowest bidder is to forfeit not just economic autonomy—but metaphysical agency.

We must restore engineering to its rightful place: a discipline of sacred consequence.

The Path Forward

We reject the elimination of immigration.
We affirm the invitation of the rare, the necessary, the exceptional.
But we draw the line at commodification. The H1B program must be gutted and rebuilt:

Cap eligibility to the top 5% of wage earners in their field. Let genius in. Shut the gate to bulk cost-minimization.

End third-party outsourcing firms that profit from labor arbitrage. Require direct employment, transparency, and salary parity.

Make companies prove they have invested in domestic training and education before they can claim a “shortage.” No more corporate freeloading.

Protect the dignity of the profession. One master engineer cannot be replaced by twenty keyboard operators without consequence.

Conclusion

This is not about foreigners. It is about formation. It is about refusing to abandon the sacred trust of raising up the next generation of creators. It is about restoring balance between business and the builder class. It is about calling industry leaders to moral responsibility—not just fiscal cunning.

If we continue to allow the creative core of engineering to be gutted in favor of labor supply chain optimization, then we will not be outcompeted by other nations.
We will be self-disqualified.

We don’t need twenty compliant coders.
We need one sovereign builder.

And we need a system that still knows the difference.