India’s ‘partnership’ leads to quiet displacement of U.S. professionals

For years, the United States has been told of a critical labor shortage, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which necessitated expanded foreign hiring. U.S. policymakers, corporations and academic institutions have promoted the narrative that India possessed a surplus of skilled talent essential to meet projected labor shortages in the United States. This claim, that America lacked sufficient STEM professionals and technical workers, served as the foundation and justification for expanding visa programs, outsourcing high-value jobs and embedding long-term foreign labor pipelines into the U.S. economy.

This narrative reshaped U.S. immigration and economic policy, positioning India as both a partner and a labor supplier. Under the banner of cooperation, American companies invested heavily in Indian operations, while visa programs such as H-1B, STEM OPT and L-1 became the backbone of a pipeline that now delivers hundreds of thousands of Indian workers into U.S. companies annually. India remains the top recipient of these work authorizations. Not only is the India government spending considerable amounts lobbying for more visas they are joined by the same companies expanding operations offshore, deepening dependence on foreign labor while reducing opportunities for Americans.

What has received far less attention is the full scope of this arrangement utilizing the U.S. visas and the documented strategy that underpins it. According to India’s own national planning documents, this is not merely an outcome of globalization or educational exchange, it is a deliberate economic program designed to export surplus labor to high-wage markets like the United States.

India’s youth strategy: a pipeline, not a partnership

India’s government has long framed its young population not as a domestic challenge, but as a global opportunity to exploit. Through its central policy think tank, the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), Indian leadership developed a comprehensive strategy to export its workforce as a competitive asset to the world. This strategy was formalized in two key policy blueprints India’s Three-Year Action Agenda (2017–2020) and the Three-Year Action Plan which identified labor mobility as a national economic priority. India projected that by 2020, it would have the world’s youngest population and by 2030, the largest working-age population at 962 million. Indian policymakers described this shift as a “demographic dividend” and positioned the surplus workforce as a solution to “reduce global skill shortages,” particularly in aging Western nations.

India positioned its youth population as a solution to global labor shortages, promoting it as a workforce resource for aging nations like the United States, where the average worker age is 40. With a national average age of just 29 by 2020, India declared itself the world’s youngest country and sought to leverage that demographic position into global labor market influence. Indian planning documents openly describe a vision to become the “global hub for skilled workforce” a role not designed to meet internal needs, but to supply talent to foreign economies.

This demographic ambition closely parallels hiring trends in the United States, especially in the tech sector. According to a 2023 report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, workers aged 25 to 39 now make up over 40.8% of the U.S. tech workforce, compared to 33.1% across the broader U.S. labor force. As younger workers dominate, older American professionals are being pushed out. Nearly 20% of discrimination complaints in the tech industry are now age-related, according to the EEOC, with many older Americans alleging exclusion and retaliation based on age.

India has capitalized on this shift. By using programs like H-1B, L-1, H-4 EAD and STEM OPT, India has not only supplied cheaper labor, but has strategically leveraged its youth to displace older American workers. As UC Davis professor Norm Matloff has documented, age is a central issue in the H-1B program. The majority of H-1B visa holders are under the age of 30 and employers benefit from hiring younger workers who are not only paid less, but also reduce long-term benefit and healthcare costs. Legally, this practice is enabled through the Department of Labor’s four-tier wage structure, which assigns wage levels based on experience. In practice, that means younger workers often from India are slotted into lower wage tiers, creating a system that bypasses older, experienced Americans through a lawful proxy for age-based preference.

This alignment between India’s demographic strategy and America’s legal framework has created a pipeline where India’s youngest workers are fast-tracked into high-value U.S. jobs, while older American professionals are systematically sidelined.

India’s message to the global economy has remained consistent: Western countries face labor shortages and India has a surplus workforce ready to fill them. But beneath this message lies a far-reaching plan, supported by national skilling schemes, credentialing programs and government-to-government agreements. These policies are not designed to benefit American workers. They are designed to shift labor value jobs, wages and long-term opportunity away from the United States and toward India.

What began as a demographic talking point has evolved into a comprehensive labor export model. The results are playing out across America’s economy today. And they are not the result of partnership. They are the product of strategy.

According to U.S. trade data, the majority of American services sold to foreign consumers are no longer being exported directly from the U.S., but are now delivered through foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational enterprises, totaling over $2.1 trillion in services in 2022 alone. That figure represents real offshoring, jobs, technologies and capital being delivered from India within the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. imports of services from foreign MNEs, many with ties to Indian outsourcing giants, totaled over $1.5 trillion, showing just how embedded foreign labor supply chains have become in America’s service economy.

India’s skill gap: Exporting engineers it admitted were unemployable

The strategy was further formalized under the National Skill Development Mission, launched in 2015 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who declared his ambition to “make India the Skill Capital of the World.” The mission’s objectives were clear: create institutional convergence, accelerate training and fast-track overseas employment placements. One major component of this mission was overseas employment, which was established to channel millions of Indian workers into international labor markets through coordinated government and industry efforts.

The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) acknowledged that only 2.3% of India’s workforce had received formal skill training. This figure stands in stark contrast to 52% in the United States, 68% in the United Kingdom and over 90% in South Korea. In addition to this low training penetration, the Indian government raised concerns over the quality of its education infrastructure. Even acknowledging that a significant portion of engineering graduates lacked the necessary skills to actually be employed as engineers.

The foundation of this strategy was laid in India’s National Skill Development Policy which formalized the use of short-term, modular training programs to issue credentials on a mass scale. Tools such as Recognition of Prior Learning enabled individuals to receive government certifications based on informal work experience rather than formal education or rigorous testing. U.S. employers and agencies later interpreted these credentials as equivalent to legitimate degrees or skill qualifications.

Private Skill Knowledge Providers were authorized to operate with limited oversight, creating a decentralized, loosely regulated skilling ecosystem. Certifications issued through public-private training centers were bundled into portfolios marketed as academic equivalencies and served as the basis for international employment pipelines including the H-1B visa, STEM OPT and employment-based green cards.

Through these mechanisms, India engineered a labor export system that no longer relied on educational excellence, but on credential scalability. With the support of U.S. companies and minimal scrutiny from immigration authorities, these certifications became tools of economic migration into the highest-value jobs in the American economy. The NSDC and MSDE, operating with government mandate, coordinated directly with foreign employers and international partners to match Indian trainees with overseas placements.

This model reveals a critical truth often obscured by policy rhetoric: India never possessed a truly skilled workforce on a global standard. What it had and continues to have is a massive, underemployed population largely lacking formal education, technical training, or industry-ready credentials. Rather than address this deficit through structural reform, India developed a credentialing system designed to convert informal labor into exportable assets.

Indian government documents repeatedly acknowledge that large portions of the population consumed more of the country’s GDP than they contributed, placing strain on national productivity. Utilizing their “demographic dividend,” India repositioned their surplus labor as a global commodity. Their ambition to become the “global talent hub” was never grounded in skill excellence,it was built on repackaging unemployment as opportunity and offloading the economic burden onto the United States labor market.

America’s immigration system repurposed: Visas, investments and the erosion of U.S. technology jobs

Let the following models illustrate the measurable success of India’s labor export strategy. They show a clear pattern: as India steadily increased its share of U.S. employment-based visas, particularly the very visa programs its government lobbies for most aggressively, such as H-1B, L-1, H-4 EAD and STEM OPT, American industries began shifting in parallel. Beginning in 2009, India’s share of these visa categories steadily grew, eventually dominating them. At the same time, U.S.-based multinational companies significantly scaled up operations in India, increased foreign direct investment and expanded offshore hiring, particularly through Indian multinational firms contracted to deliver outsourced labor services.

Nonimmigrant Visa Issuances by Visa Class and by Nationality

Changes in Host Country Employment for U.S. Multinational Enterprises,

This correlation is not coincidental. As visa approvals for Indian nationals surged, so too did the number of American jobs relocated overseas. These trends were accompanied by rising employment in India, rapid expansion of Indian outsourcing firms and increasing dependency on offshore labor models. Meanwhile, U.S. workers faced mounting job insecurity, wage stagnation and waves of layoffs, particularly in the tech and engineering sectors most impacted by these shifts.

These practices have contributed to a quiet displacement of American professionals. While framed as meeting demand, the pipeline has come to dominate sectors like IT, engineering, pharmaceuticals and consulting, fields where wage depression, age discrimination and outsourcing have grown alongside foreign labor market access. American workers find themselves navigating an employment system increasingly built around imported labor, foreign certification networks and bilateral workforce agreements that few voters or legislators have ever seen.

India’s vision to become the world’s “Skill Capital” is not rhetorical. It is a multi-agency operation backed by state policy, foreign investment and diplomatic engagement. Its goals are clearly stated and its implementation is ongoing. What remains to be seen is whether the United States will continue to treat this as partnership, or begin to recognize it as a strategic labor realignment with serious consequences for Americans.

From policy to profit: The results of India’s engineered labor takeover

The evidence is now clear. India’s labor export strategy, marketed under the guise of cooperation and global talent sharing, was never simply about filling gaps or meeting temporary needs. It was a deliberate, long-term campaign to embed Indian labor into the foundation of the U.S. workforce through policy influence, credential manipulation and immigration program domination. And now, the outcomes of that campaign are no longer theoretical, they are measurable.

India has successfully positioned itself as a global destination for job creation, not just by generating domestic employment, but by absorbing jobs that were once part of the American economy. The same multinational corporations that lobbied for more work visas, citing talent shortages, have simultaneously offshored entire departments to India, facilitated by both U.S. and Indian MNEs. These corporations built offices, training centers and R&D hubs across Indian cities while scaling back hiring at home.

India’s domination of the U.S. immigration system was not the end goal. It was the vehicle. What followed was a transfer of opportunity, wage growth and middle-class economic security from the United States to India. The result is an American labor market now structurally dependent on foreign-supplied labor and an Indian economy strengthened by the very visa programs and corporate relationships that were originally promoted as mutually beneficial.

The numbers don’t lie. India has not only produced more jobs for its own people, but it has done so by systematically capturing and redirecting jobs, investment and workforce opportunity once meant for Americans. This is not the result of chance, but of strategy. And unless the U.S. confronts the scope of this manipulation and reclaims control of its labor and immigration systems, the trajectory will continue, more American jobs lost, more foreign systems embedded and a generation of U.S. workers left behind.

At WND, we are committed to exposing the truth behind what we now recognize as the immigration industrial complex. Follow us as we continue to investigate how our own visa systems are being used to undermine American workers, American wages and American sovereignty, while the architects of these schemes profit from the silence.