H-1B Holocaust or AI Savior? The Visa Bill That’s Tearing Silicon Valley Apart
Silicon Valley is on fire—and not the good kind.
A single piece of legislation introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has detonated a cultural and economic fault line running straight through the heart of American tech. Her H-1B Phase-Out Act of 2025 proposes a five-year sunset on the program that brings in roughly 85,000 foreign tech workers annually, with a brutal twist: 80% of those visas currently go to entry-level roles, and 70% are issued to Indian nationals, followed by 10–15% to Chinese citizens.
MTG didn’t mince words in her viral X video (now at 4.2 million views):
“Big Tech isn’t hiring the best—they’re hiring the cheapest. They fire American coders and replace them with indentured servants on H-1Bs. This ends now.”
Cue the apocalypse.
The Bill: A 5-Year Kill Switch
Greene’s proposal is surgical.
Year 2026: 65,000 cap, immediate 23% cut.
Year 2027: 45,000 cap, entry-level roles capped at 30%.
Year 2028: 25,000 cap, only PhD-level or “critical infrastructure” roles.
Year 2029: 10,000 cap, legacy extensions only.
Year 2030: 0, program terminated.
No grandfather clause. No transition fund. Just a hard stop.
The Two Tribes of Tech Twitter
Team America First
Leaders: MTG, Laura Loomer, @BasedMikeLee
Argument: H-1Bs depress wages by 15–22% in software engineering (per EPI study), trap workers in golden handcuffs, and fund foreign competitors.
Viral Proof: A leaked Meta memo showed 92% of new grad hires in Menlo Park were H-1B recipients, while US tech unemployment hit 5.8% in Q3 2025.
Team Global Brain Drain
Leaders: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, @paulg
Argument: America’s edge comes from importing the world’s top 1%. Ending H-1B would hand AI supremacy to China and India overnight.
Viral Proof: 42% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.
The Real Stakes: Innovation vs. Identity
This isn’t just a policy fight—it’s an identity crisis for American tech.
On one side: millions of laid-off US engineers watching entry-level jobs vanish to visa holders paid 30% less. On the other: AI labs warning of a brain drain that could let China dominate the next decade of computing.
Elon Musk fired back on X:
“If we send the world’s best engineers home, we don’t win. We lose. And China thanks us.”
Sam Altman echoed:
“AI doesn’t care about borders. Talent does. Kill H-1B, kill American AI.”
Meanwhile, leaked internal Slack messages from Google and Microsoft show panic: 40% of their AI research teams are visa-dependent. One engineer wrote: “We’ll be debugging COBOL in Kansas by 2030.”
What Happens Next?
The bill faces an uphill battle in a divided Congress, but the cultural damage is done. Indian and Chinese students are already canceling US grad school apps—Stanford reports a 28% drop in international AI applicants since MTG’s announcement.
Big Tech is lobbying hard: $12 million poured into DC last week alone. But public sentiment is shifting. Polls show 61% of Americans now support H-1B reform—up from 44% in 2023.
The Bottom Line
Whether this is a Holocaust for foreign talent or a savior for American workers depends on who you ask. But one thing is clear: Silicon Valley’s global talent pipeline is cracking, and the next five years will decide if America builds the future—or watches someone else do it.
Stay tuned. This war is just beginning.
