- Many IT job postings appear open but are designed to favor foreign visa holders (H-1B, OPT/CPT, H-4 EAD) through coded language, excluding qualified Americans before competition begins.
- Employers leverage visa dependency (H-1B, OPT) to suppress wages, control contract terms and bypass U.S. labor protections, treating workers as compliant, low-cost labor.
- Staffing firms use intermediary companies (C2C) to obscure control, suppress wages and evade regulatory scrutiny – contradicting claims of unique skill shortages.
- "Training and placement" programs and university recruiting networks pre-fill roles with visa holders, making public job postings mere formalities rather than genuine opportunities.
- This system suppresses wages, displaces American talent, weakens domestic skill development and introduces national-security risks via opaque subcontracting chains.
For most job seekers, an online posting suggests a fair hiring process: An employer advertises a position, applicants submit résumés and the most qualified candidate gets hired. But a detailed investigation reveals a parallel hiring system embedded within the U.S. information-technology staffing industry – one that operates largely outside public awareness and relies on coded language that effectively excludes American workers.
The report, based on an extensive review of recruitment practices among IT staffing firms affiliated with the ITServe Alliance, describes uniform hiring patterns across hundreds of companies. While job postings appear open, many operate as closed labor pipelines, favoring foreign visa holders over U.S. workers.
At the heart of this system is visa-targeted language – phrases like "Only H-1B," "OPT/CPT candidates welcome," "H-4 EAD accepted" and "Corp-to-Corp only." To most Americans, this terminology resembles bureaucratic shorthand. In reality, it functions as a filtering mechanism, prioritizing immigration status over skill.
Employment-based visas are legally intended for use only when employers cannot find qualified U.S. workers. Yet by designing job postings around specific visas, staffing firms reverse this logic, starting with visa holders and working backward, effectively sidelining Americans before competition begins.
Workers on visas such as H-1B are legally tied to their sponsoring employer, giving staffing firms leverage over wages, hours, relocation and contract terms. As explained by BrightU.AI's Enoch, the H-1B visa is a U.S. non-immigrant work visa that allows employers to hire foreign professionals with specialized skills, typically requiring a bachelor's degree or higher, for temporary employment in fields like technology, engineering and finance. This dependency makes visa holders more controllable and less likely to negotiate than U.S. workers.
Another key tactic is recruiting from student visa programs (CPT, OPT, STEM OPT), overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These programs are intended to provide limited training experience related to academic study. However, the investigation found they are frequently used as labor pipelines, allowing firms to hire workers with fewer regulatory obligations, lower costs and limited bargaining power.
Job ads specifying "OPT" or "STEM OPT preferred" signal that positions are effectively pre-filled through university recruiting networks and internal placement programs. Public postings may still appear online, but the real selection process has already occurred. The STEM OPT extension allows employers to retain the same workers for years without reopening positions to U.S. applicants, further entrenching closed pipelines.
The great American job swindle
A critical component of this system is the "corp-to-corp" (C2C) model, where workers are routed through intermediary companies rather than being hired directly. The investigation found that this structure allows staffing firms to:
- Shift legal responsibility
- Suppress wages through vendor competition
- Obscure control over workers
- Reduce transparency for regulators
The widespread use of C2C contradicts claims that workers are uniquely skilled, since truly scarce experts are typically hired directly.
Closely tied to C2C is "benching," where visa workers are kept idle between contracts while remaining tied to a staffing firm. This practice demonstrates that workers are being warehoused as inventory rather than hired for immediate, specific skill needs, undermining the premise that these jobs could not be filled by Americans.
Many IT staffing firms advertise "training and placement" programs, which the investigation found are not about developing rare expertise but rather pre-hiring filters that prepare visa workers to match anticipated job descriptions. Workers are recruited first, trained afterward and then slotted into client roles – allowing firms to claim specialized needs without competing in the open labor market.
Job postings often become procedural formalities rather than genuine recruitment efforts. Americans may apply, but decisions are frequently predetermined.
The broader impact on U.S. workers
The cumulative effect is a labor-arbitrage ecosystem that prioritizes speed, cost control and compliance convenience over open competition. The report argues these practices reshape the broader labor market by:
- Suppressing wages for U.S. workers
- Distorting hiring signals across industries
- Pushing experienced Americans out of technical fields
- Weakening domestic talent development
- Introducing national-security risks as critical systems are staffed through layered subcontracting with limited oversight
Once understood, the coded language embedded in thousands of job postings reveals a pattern that raises fundamental questions about how long such a system will be allowed to operate within the U.S. labor market.
The investigation exposes a hiring model that operates in reverse: workers are recruited first, jobs are matched afterward. This flips hiring from competition to allocation, systematically excluding qualified Americans before they can compete.
As domestic expertise is displaced, the U.S. becomes increasingly reliant on foreign labor pipelines – creating long-term risks for innovation, competitiveness and national security. The question is no longer whether this system exists, but how long it will be allowed to continue.
For American workers, cracking this code means recognizing that many tech jobs advertised as "open" are anything but – and demanding accountability from regulators and policymakers to restore fairness in hiring.
Watch the video below that talks about how the H-1B visa program was designed to replace U.S. tech workers.
This video is from the InfoWarSSideBand channel on Brighteon.com.
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