Let's talk about the real reason people can't find jobs in tech. It isn't a visa program. It's execution.
Nitish Kannan, CEO and founder of Circle Plus Pay, recently set off a massive internet firestorm by calling out job seekers who blame the H-1B visa cap for their own unemployment. He didn't sugarcoat it. He called it a pathetic victim mentality, comparing modern corporate whinging to lazy classmates who sat in the back of the room and complained when others got top grades. Predictably, the trolls swarmed. They told him to leave the country. They missed the funniest part of their own outrage: he was born in the United States. He's an American citizen.
The backlash misses the math completely. The US issues roughly 65,000 H-1B visas annually. Meanwhile, the domestic labor market features tens of millions of active job openings across various sectors. Pointing at a tiny fraction of immigrant workers and claiming they stole your career is an easy cop-out. It lets mediocre talent avoid looking in the mirror.
The Core Misconception About Tech Employment
We love a scapegoat. When the job market tightens, pointing fingers at foreign workers feels comforting. It gives you an enemy. It tells you that the system is rigged, meaning your failure isn't your fault.
Except the data tells a different story. If you look at high-performing engineering teams, they don't care about your passport. They care if you can ship code, fix a broken database, or architect a scalable system under pressure. Companies are desperate for competence. They aren't turning away local talent out of malice; they're hiring people who actually know how to build things.
I've seen this dynamic firsthand in startup hiring rooms. Founders spend weeks looking for senior developers who can work independently. Resumes pour in by the hundreds, but most candidates can't pass a basic practical coding assessment or explain a system design choice without reading from a script. When those candidates get rejected, many prefer to vent on social media about immigration policies rather than upskill.
School Benchmarks And Corporate Reality
Kannan's comparison to school days hits close to home for anyone who ever worked for a living. Remember group projects? There were always a few people who contributed nothing, showed up late, and then complained when the grading curve favored the students who pulled all-nighters.
The corporate world is just a harsher version of that exact classroom.
- Skill beats pedigree: Having a degree from a famous university means nothing if you haven't kept your stack modern.
- Action beats excuses: While some spend hours debating macro-economics online, others are building open-source projects or shipping indie apps.
- Complaining solves nothing: The market doesn't owe you a salary based on your zip code.
The Reality Of Immigrant Competition
Immigrants face massive systemic hurdles in Western job markets. Most corporate positions require permanent residency or citizenship, immediately locking foreign applicants out of thousands of roles. Visa holders live under constant uncertainty, dealing with grueling renewal paperwork, green card backlogs, and the constant threat of sudden layoffs that give them sixty days to pack up their lives.
If anything, the playing field forces immigrant professionals to operate with extreme urgency. They can't afford to coast. When someone enters an environment with everything on the line, their output often outpaces someone who feels entitled to a comfortable middle-class existence simply by virtue of being born locally.
Instead of demanding protectionism, the focus needs to shift toward fixing foundational education and practical training. If local graduates feel threatened by imported talent, the solution isn't locking the doors. The solution is raising the standard of education so that local talent can compete head-to-head and win.
Stop scrolling through forums looking for someone to blame for your career stagnation. Pick a hard problem, learn a high-value skill, and start building.
