2003 was the year I stopped being able to find work in my own field. That’s a personal claim, not a data point — so this report keeps the two separate. What BLS’s own numbers show: women’s labor force participation peaked in April 2000 and, as of August 2026, sits below where it was in 1990. The H-1B cap was tripled to 195,000 a year right as the dot-com bust hit U.S. tech workers, and GAO itself was flagging the tracking gap in a report published in September 2003. And from a $34 million DOJ settlement with Infosys in 2013 through a $3.2 million one with OpenAI in August 2026 — plus an ongoing federal jury finding against Cognizant and an active caste-discrimination case against Cisco — the paper trail of companies found to have preferred visa holders over Americans keeps growing.
H-1B
The State Calls It Staff Aug. We Mapped It Against H-1B Filings.
Texas agencies buy the same IT-staffing program under dozens of different contract labels ITSAC, Staff Aug, FY26AUGR, Temporary Personnel Services which means a keyword search for ITSAC alone misses most of the market. We built a synonym-based match across every label, found 414 active statewide staffing-vendor relationships across 62 agencies, and cross-referenced all of them against federal H-1B sponsorship data.
122 vendors are also H-1B sponsors. Nine have H-1B sponsorship that is 100 percent concentrated in Texas. We independently verified two of their certified workers filed worksite addresses against public government-building directories they are state agency headquarters.
$44 Million In Texas Contracts. Zero H-1B Filings.
Bansar Technologies own HUB Subcontracting Plan names 23 IT-staffing subcontractors and exactly how much of a Texas state contract each one gets. We ran all 23 against a decade of federal visa-sponsorship data. The HUB credit and the actual H-1B labor go to almost entirely different companies — and one HUB subcontractor with no visa footprint turns out to be running $44 million of its own, completely separate Texas state business.
The Vendor Changes. The Worker Doesn’t.
We found three named individuals who kept working the exact same Texas state agency role after the company billing for their time changed — not subcontracting, but vendor succession: a new, separate state contract awarded to a different staffing company, same worker, no gap.
Who Actually Files for H-1B Workers? Government Is Almost Nobody
We broke down all 437,496 FY2026 H-1B labor applications by employer type — government agencies, universities, K-12 schools, and private business — plus a size and legal-dependency split inside the private sector.
The headline: true state, local, and federal government agencies filed just 499 applications directly. Even after tracing contractor placements at government worksites (IT staffing firms placing workers inside state agencies, and a separate niche of therapy-staffing firms placing H-1B occupational and speech therapists in school districts), the government footprint only reaches 0.73% of all filings.
The bigger, harder story is inside the private sector: 102 large filers — 0.18% of private employers — account for 64% of all positions requested, and DOL’s own legal ‘H-1B dependent’ designation turns out to track the ‘Intel good, Infosys bad’ distinction far better than company size does.
CGI’s H-1B Playbook: The Same 50-Worker Filing, From Texas to California
CGI Technologies and Solutions Inc. filed 17,046 H-1B worker positions in FY2026 — the 4th-largest H-1B footprint of any employer in the country. The same identical-terms, 50-worker batch petition it runs for PNC Financial and Fidelity Investments also runs at state government agencies in Texas, California, New York, Nevada, and Virginia. At TxDOT alone, CGI’s H-1B headcount went from 2 workers in FY2025 to 101 in FY2026 — a 50x jump in one year.
This is a follow-on to our Texas Agency Series (TxDOT, the Attorney General’s Office, the Comptroller, Agriculture, and DFPS).
https://guestworkervisas.com/cgi_technologies_state_government_h1b.php
Gabon Protected Its Workers by Law in 1975. America Doesn’t, in 2026.
At sixteen, working an oilfield crew in Port-Gentil, Gabon, I was made supervisor — not because I’d earned it, but because Gabonese law reserved ordinary labor jobs for Gabonese nationals and only let foreigners in through supervisory work-permit slots. That rule is still on the books today: Gabon’s oil and mining sector runs on a legal 85% domestic-workforce floor. The H-1B program has no floor at all.
Who’s Supplying H-1B Labor Inside DOL’s Own Headquarters?
Every certified H-1B application discloses the worker’s physical worksite, by law. We matched that field directly against the Department of Labor’s own headquarters address and found 171 placements from 46 staffing and IT firms since FY2020 — then checked the top repeat placers against USASpending.gov. Most have no public federal contract on record at all.
Abbott’s H-1B Ban Just Reached Schools. It Still Hasn’t Reached $743 Million in State Contractors
Gov. Abbott has now told two different kinds of taxpayer-funded institutions, seven months apart, that they shouldn’t be paying for H-1B labor: state agencies and universities in January, public schools in August. Both times the stated reason is the same: taxpayer money.
Neither order touches the largest taxpayer-funded H-1B channel we’ve found: private state contractors. Fourteen confirmed H-1B-sponsoring vendors have been paid $743.2 million across 1,916 Texas state contracts since 2013 — and 11 of those 14 vendors won new state contract awards on or after the day Abbott’s freeze took effect.
Why Americans Can’t Find Jobs: The Number Nobody’s Counting
In FY2025 the U.S. issued 859,476 worker visas while the economy created just 584,000 net new jobs — 1.47 worker visas for every job created, about 6.6x the normal 2011-2019 rate and higher than any point during the 2008 financial-crisis recovery.
Read the plain-language breakdown, or see the full 39-year data and methodology.