11/21/2025
The Hidden Cost of Corporate Efficiency: How Banks, Manufacturers, and Tech Giants Are Prioritizing Cheap, Tied Labor Over American Workers Amid Mass Layoffs
In recent years, a disturbing pattern has solidified across American industries: companies announce large-scale layoffs of U.S. workers—blaming “restructuring,” “cost-cutting,” or “AI efficiencies”—while quietly renewing or expanding their pools of H-1B visa holders. These are not elite “foreign specialists” flown in for rare genius-level skills. A significant portion are ordinary software developers, testers, and mid-level engineers—many with marginal English proficiency, recruited in bulk from overseas staffing firms, and paid at the lowest allowable prevailing-wage levels. The same companies that claim they can’t find American talent are simultaneously shedding thousands of experienced U.S. employees while keeping (and growing) a workforce that is legally tethered to the employer and far cheaper to retain over the long run.
This practice is no longer confined to Silicon Valley giants. It has become standard operating procedure at Wall Street banks and at foreign-owned manufacturers with large U.S. footprints such as Japan’s Yazaki Corporation and Germany’s thyssenkrupp Materials NA.
Wall Street Banks: American Analysts Out, Low-Cost H-1B Coders In
Major U.S. banks have mastered the art of the two-track workforce. In 2024–2025, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo all conducted waves of layoffs in technology, operations, and risk-management groups—often targeting higher-paid American employees with 10–20 years of experience. At the same time, these same banks continued to file hundreds of Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) for H-1B workers, many placed through Indian outsourcing giants like Infosys, TCS, and Cognizant.
The workers arriving on these visas are frequently recent graduates or mid-level coders whose written and spoken English is functional at best. Internal whistleblower accounts and Glassdoor reviews from multiple banks describe meetings where entire development teams struggle to communicate, with American managers spending hours re-explaining requirements that U.S. staff would have grasped immediately. Yet these workers are retained during layoffs because they cost 30–50% less when total compensation (salary + benefits + job security premium) is calculated, and because they cannot easily leave.
Foreign-Owned Manufacturers: Yazaki and thyssenkrupp Follow the Same Playbook
Yazaki North America, the U.S. arm of the Japanese wiring-harness giant, has plants and engineering centers in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and the Southeast. The company has a long history of using H-1B and L-1 visas to staff engineering and IT roles. In FY 2025 it filed dozens of new LCAs even as some U.S. facilities operated with reduced American headcount after earlier restructuring. Many of the H-1B employees are Indian or Chinese nationals on their second or third six-year visa cycle, still waiting in green-card backlogs that stretch 15–20 years.
thyssenkrupp Materials NA has taken a similar path. Despite periodic layoffs and plant closures in the U.S. (often citing “market conditions” in automotive and aerospace), the company continues to sponsor H-1B engineers and supply-chain specialists. Again, the visa holders are not irreplaceable experts; they are competent but interchangeable workers who accept lower effective compensation because the visa itself is worth tens of thousands of dollars to them on the black market back home.
Why These Workers Are Retained and Expanded While Americans Are Laid Off
The H-1B program creates a perfect storm of exploitation—for both the visa holder and the displaced American:
Legal Indenturer: An H-1B worker who loses their job has only 60 days to find another sponsor or leave the country. This makes them extraordinarily compliant. They rarely push back on 60–80-hour weeks, poor working conditions, or stagnant pay. American workers, by contrast, can—and do—walk across the street to a competitor.
Extensions Are the Real Growth Engine: Roughly 70–75% of the ~400,000 annual H-1B “approvals” in recent years are extensions and renewals, not new-cap visas. Companies have tens of thousands of workers trapped in green-card limbo. Laying them off means losing years of accumulated knowledge and starting over with a new visa holder who will demand the same multi-decade wait. Far cheaper to keep the existing captive worker.
Prevailing-Wage Loopholes Make Them Bargain Labor: The Department of Labor’s four-tier wage system is routinely gamed. A Level 1 or Level 2 wage (often $70k–$90k in high-cost areas) is legal for someone classified as “entry-level” even if the actual job requires years of experience. Add minimal benefits, no real overtime pay, and the threat of deportation, and the total cost of ownership is far below a mid-career American earning $140k+ plus full benefits.
Two-Tier Workforce by Design: When layoffs come, the axe falls overwhelmingly on the mobile, expensive, rights-bearing American tier. The visa-dependent tier is protected because replacing them is risky and costly. In 2024–2025 alone, companies across tech, finance, and manufacturing laid off over 260,000 U.S. workers while USCIS approved record numbers of H-1B extensions.
The H-1B workers themselves are victims in this system—recruited with false promises, charged exorbitant “placement fees” by recruiters in their home countries (sometimes $20,000–$30,000), and kept in a state of perpetual anxiety about their immigration status. But that exploitation is precisely why corporations fight so hard to preserve and expand the program. It delivers a docile, low-cost workforce that undercuts American professionals while allowing executives to boast about “diversity” and “global talent.”
Until the incentives are flipped—until companies face real penalties for laying off Americans while hoarding visa-dependent labor—the bleeding of middle-class STEM jobs will continue, and the United States will keep importing a new underclass to replace its own citizens.
