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.
Immigration
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.
State Never Published FY2025 Visa Data, So We Rebuilt It
The State Department still hasn’t published its FY2025 nonimmigrant visa class-of-admission table, nearly eleven months after the fiscal year closed. Its monthly issuance reports kept publishing on schedule though, so we pulled and parsed all twelve ourselves and reconstructed the FY2025 numbers — H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and 74 other classes — now loaded into our visa data browser alongside every year back to 1987.
https://guestworkervisas.com/state_dept_fy2025_niv_reconstruction.php
No Law Against It? The Actual Legal Landscape Around H-1B Displacement
Told there’s no law stopping a Texas state contractor from staffing its work almost entirely with H-1B workers instead of Americans? We went through the actual statutes — IRCA’s citizenship-discrimination ban, the H-1B non-displacement attestation, the 2017 Buy American Hire American executive order, and Texas’s own contractor rules — to see what each really requires, who enforces it, and where each one’s reach stops.
https://guestworkervisas.com/h1b_displacement_legal_landscape.php
Zero Waivers, 326 New Hires: Texas’s H-1B Freeze Has No Enforcement Mechanism
Six months after Gov. Abbott froze new H-1B filings at Texas state agencies and public universities unless the Texas Workforce Commission grants written permission, zero institutions had requested that permission as of July 17 — while DOL data shows 326 new-hire H-1B filings certified anyway. Reporters who asked TWC to explain were pointed at the state’s public records law instead of getting an answer.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_h1b_freeze_zero_enforcement.php
Where Would U.S. Employment Be Without Foreign Workers?
Where would U.S. employment be without foreign workers?
Actual U.S. nonfarm payrolls, 1939–present (FRED series PAYEMS, BLS CES establishment survey), compared against a counterfactual: starting from the real Dec 2006 payroll level — the last month before BLS began separately tracking native-born vs. foreign-born employment — and adding only the growth in native-born employment (BLS Table A-7, CPS household survey) each month since.
Both lines are identical through Dec 2006. After that point, the orange line stops following actual payroll growth and instead only adds however many more native-born workers were employed each month.