A Declaration by American Technology Workers

We, the undersigned, are American technology workers — engineers, architects, security specialists, designers, researchers, and operators. We have built the systems this country runs on. We are watching our industry eat its seed corn, and we will not be quiet about it.

What we built

Before any of this happened — before the staffing fraud, before the visa abuse, before the AI screens — there was a tradition. Americans built modern technology. Americans built it in American universities, American defense labs, and American companies, often as a direct outgrowth of public investment in research at a scale no one else was attempting at the time.

The transistor, at Bell Labs in 1947. The integrated circuit, at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor in the late 1950s. The Apollo program, which put twelve Americans on the moon, built by NASA and a constellation of American contractors. ARPANET, the foundation of the internet, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and built by American researchers at American universities. Unix and the C programming language, out of Bell Labs. The personal computer, in American garages and American research centers. The graphical user interface and the modern computer mouse, at Xerox PARC. Mosaic, the browser that made the World Wide Web a public phenomenon, at the University of Illinois. The smartphone as we know it, in California. The modern public cloud, by American companies in American data centers, designed and run by American engineers. The foundational research behind today’s machine learning systems, in American university labs.

This is not nostalgia. It is the record. The American technology workforce being routed out of its own industry today is the workforce that built every layer of the system the world now runs on. Our credentials are not in question. Our capability is not in question. Our right to be here is not in question. We are not asking to be allowed in. We are reclaiming what we built.

What we see

The argument used to justify all of it is that there is a skills shortage — that American technology workers do not have what the work requires. We are going to ask the question the people making this claim never answer: what are these skills? Name them.

Distributed systems, built in America. Cloud infrastructure, built in America. Operating systems, databases, compilers, search, the entire web stack, machine learning and the research that led to it, mobile platforms, security engineering, cryptography, networking, embedded systems, SRE, data engineering — every one of these disciplines was invented here, has been taught at American universities for decades, and is held by a deep, multi-generational American workforce that learned them on the job in American companies and is being told right now that those decades do not count. The skills are not missing. The willingness to look for them in the people who already have them is what is missing.

The mechanics of how the lie is enforced are documented and specific. Job listings are routinely posted demanding requirements that are mathematically impossible to satisfy — five years of experience in a framework that has existed for two, expert proficiency in a tool released last quarter, certifications no human currently holds. The purpose of these requirements is not to find a candidate. It is to ensure the search “fails” so the employer can file the fraudulently filed federal labor certification falsely claiming no qualified American could be found after they didnt even try, and bring in a temporary visa worker instead. The requirement was designed to be impossible. The “failure” was the goal. The visa filing was the entire point of the listing.

Take AI specifically — the most-cited “skills gap” of the moment. The Americans being rejected from AI roles right now include people who have built the harnesses, trained the models, and shipped these systems from scratch — and who use the current tools every day, because building the deep version of something does not preclude using the convenient version of it. They are being told they are unqualified by hiring processes that prefer candidates whose entire AI experience is making REST calls to someone else’s API. The person who built the system is being passed over for the person who has only ever called it. That is not a skills assessment. It is the inverse of one — and it is a clear demonstration that “skills” has nothing to do with what is actually being decided.

What is actually happening is fraud — committed openly, on multiple layers of the hiring system, in plain view of regulators who are only beginning to act.

The companies are lying on the visa paperwork. Workers brought in on temporary visa programs are sponsored on the federal claim that the role requires skills so rare that no American can be found. The Department of Labor’s own data shows the majority of those positions are simultaneously certified at the lowest two wage tiers — entry-level and junior wages. If the expertise were genuinely rare, the wage would reflect it. It does not, because what is actually getting done is junior work. The “rare expertise” story exists on the visa filing to bypass the American applicant pool. The wage tier exists on the same filing to keep the labor cheap. Both are true at once, and both are on the face of the paperwork. That is fraud, institutionalized at scale — and the American who was structurally excluded was excluded from work they were overqualified for, not from work they could not do.

The companies are lying about savings. Executives book the labor-cost reduction as a quarterly win. What they have actually purchased is a workforce that cannot stay, cannot be held accountable under American law, and walks out the door with the company’s institutional knowledge the moment a visa lapses or a contract ends. The “savings” are real on the spreadsheet and false in the business. Federal courts are increasingly willing to call them what they are — settlements and jury verdicts against firms that explicitly excluded U.S. citizens from job postings are no longer rare. The pattern is adjudicated. Repeatedly.

The recruiters are running a process that is not recruiting. What used to be a relationship is now a containment operation. Candidates spend hours in interview pipelines designed to extract information and absorb their attention without ever converging on a real role. The success condition for the operator is not to hire — it is to keep capable Americans busy chasing nothing, depleted, and out of the market for as long as possible. Every hour spent on a fake process is an hour not spent on a real one. This is denial-of-service applied to a career.

The staffing industry is running fraud at every layer of the contract. The same workers appear on the resumes of multiple competing agencies. Resumes are routinely inflated to claim experience the worker does not have. Customers are sold senior consultants and delivered junior ones — the practice is openly called “bait and switch” inside the industry, and federal law enforcement has begun naming it as such. Customers are billed at senior rates while the workers actually doing the work are paid a fraction of that, with the spread captured by layers of subcontracting that obscure who the customer is even paying for. The American technologists who refuse to participate in any of this are routinely beaten on price by the firms that do — because the firms doing it are not selling labor at a real cost. They are selling fraud at a discount.

The screens are rejecting people who can do the work. Major HR platforms reject candidates at industrial scale via automated systems whose decision-making nobody audits. Class actions are pending. The EEOC has weighed in. Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA all apply. The Americans being rejected are not unqualified. They are being routed around.

The tax classification is fraudulent. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 restored immediate expensing for domestic research and development under Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code while retaining the 15-year capitalization requirement for foreign research and development. The federal tax code now creates a meaningful, measurable, dollar-denominated incentive to perform American R&D with American workers. Companies that continue to perform R&D offshore — through contracts, captive offshore subsidiaries, or visa-dependent workers managed from foreign offices — and then classify that work on their tax filings as something other than what it is to avoid the 15-year amortization, are committing tax fraud against the federal treasury on top of the labor fraud against American workers. The fraud is one fraud. The misclassification on the tax filing and the misclassification on the LCA are made by the same actor, for the same reason, and at the same scale.

These mechanisms are not coincidences. They are stable because the vendors and staffing firms running them have a structural reason to keep them stable. Their entire business model depends on the perception that there are no qualified Americans available — because the moment an American gets hired into a role, the vendor loses a seat in the pipeline, and the work that follows makes the comparison obvious. An American technologist whose career, family, and future are rooted in this country brings a depth of commitment, accountability, and continuity that a vendor placement structurally cannot. The vendor knows this. That is exactly why the vendor invests so heavily in making sure the comparison never happens. They flood the pipeline with their own supply, they capture the recruiting layer, and they keep the “no Americans available” story alive — because if the story ever broke, the customers would notice that the people they actually wanted to hire were here the whole time.

The lie underneath all of it

The story being told to American technology workers is that they are not good enough. That they lack the skills. That they cost too much. That the talent has to be sourced elsewhere because it cannot be found here.

That story is a lie. It is told because the truth is illegal: companies are saving money by committing fraud, and the people who would be doing the work — Americans with the credentials, the skills, and the track record — are being structurally excluded so the fraud can continue.

This is not a skills problem. It is a fraud problem. And the workers being lied about have done nothing wrong.

The duty of care, violated

When a board approves a workforce strategy that depends on temporary labor tied to a single employer, that strategy is a continuity risk. When that workforce can leave, be recalled, or lose authorization at any time — and take institutional knowledge with it into a jurisdiction where the company has no enforcement reach — the board has built the company’s future on a dependency it does not control.

That is not cost optimization. That is a violation of the duty of care, of the kind Caremark and Van Gorkom exist to prevent. Constituency statutes in more than thirty states explicitly permit boards to consider the interests of employees and communities, not just shareholders. The legal framework is already in place. It is being ignored because nobody enforces it.

The pipeline, severed

The damage that compounds the most is the leadership pipeline.

Leadership is not a credential. It is the result of two decades of mistakes made early, lessons learned in the middle, and judgment earned at the end. You become a senior technologist by being a junior one first, then a mid-level one, then a senior one — under the mentorship of people who already made it through. That progression is the only way it has ever worked.

That pipeline has been cut. Junior-to-mid is gone: entry-level technical jobs that used to develop American careers are now filled by temporary workers or absorbed by AI screens that refuse to even let an American applicant be evaluated. Mid-to-senior is gone: the roles where engineers used to grow into architects and leads have been offshored or structured to never produce a domestic promotion. The Americans who already made it to senior are still here, but the next generation behind them does not exist — because the rungs they were supposed to climb were removed while they were standing on the ground floor.

The companies cutting these roles today are eating their own seed corn. They book the savings this quarter, while making it impossible to staff the leadership roles they themselves will need to fill in a decade. There is no skills shortage coming. There is a skills shortage being manufactured, on purpose, by the people who will then turn around and use it as the justification to do more of the same.

In ten years, this country will not have the senior technical leaders it needs to run its own infrastructure, defend its own systems, or build its own next generation of companies — unless the rebuilding starts now.

A national security threat

This is not only a labor market problem. It is a national security threat, and we are going to be plain about it.

America’s weapons systems — the F-35 program with its eight million lines of code, the Aegis Combat System, tactical communications networks, satellite command infrastructure, signals intelligence platforms, the cyber capabilities that defend American networks against active intrusion — are all maintained by civilian contractors who come from the commercial technology labor market. There is no separate “defense talent pool” sitting in reserve. The defense industrial base hires from the same pool of American engineers as the commercial sector. The Government Accountability Office has warned, repeatedly, that a degraded commercial technology workforce becomes a degraded defense capability with a lag time measured in years.

Every American technologist driven out of this industry today is a person who is not available to clear, train, and staff a defense-relevant role tomorrow. Security clearances take months to years to obtain. Technical specializations take a decade to develop. When the commercial pipeline is broken, the defense contractors cannot backfill from people who no longer exist in the market. A generation of senior American engineers being driven out of the field today is a generation of cleared, experienced professionals who will not be available to the defense industrial base in five years. The country does not get those people back.

Whether the parties running the fraud described above set out to degrade American military capability is beside the point. The effect is the same. A workforce that has been systematically excluded, demoralized, and forced into other fields cannot be summoned back when the country needs it. The capability is being depleted by the actors who profit from the depletion, and the country will absorb the consequences whether or not the depletion was strategic in intent.

This is not only a hiring fight or a fiduciary fight. It is a national security fight. The technical labor pool that builds American commercial software is the same technical labor pool that maintains American military systems. You cannot destroy the first without compromising the second. We are watching exactly that happen.

This is happening to people on purpose

We need to be plain about what this is. This is not a market accident. It is not even passive exclusion. It is active harm — committed deliberately, against people who dedicated their lives to building American technology, by a system that decided their continued participation was bad for someone’s quarterly numbers.

The Americans being routed out of this industry are not unknown to the people running the system. Their resumes have been read. Their work has been seen. The decision is not “we cannot find them” — it is “we have found them, and we have decided not to look.” They are being prevented from working. They are being prevented from showing their value. They are being told they are not good enough for work they have done at a high level for two decades, by a process designed to make sure the rejection looks like the market’s verdict instead of a deliberate choice.

The damage is not abstract. In 2025, 1.2 million Americans were laid off — the highest rate since the pandemic — while the Federal Reserve Chair publicly said private-sector job creation is “pretty close to zero.” More than a quarter of unemployed Americans are now long-term unemployed, out of work for 27 weeks or more. One in five job seekers has been searching for ten to twelve months. The average job posting receives 242 applications. There are nearly a million more unemployed people than there are available jobs.

What that looks like in a single household: severance runs out in month 6. Savings are gone by month 12. The first missed mortgage payment comes around month 13. The credit score collapses. The marriage strains. The kids ask why they cannot do soccer anymore. The house gets sold short, sometimes into a foreclosure. The skills that took two decades to build start to atrophy from disuse, and the candidate knows it. By month 24 they are not applying for engineering jobs anymore. They are working at a hardware store. Multiply that by tens of thousands of people happening simultaneously and you get a cultural shift — a professional class learning that the system they trusted does not work, that playing by the rules does not protect them.

Some of them do not make it to month 24. Suicide rates among unemployed men are two to three times higher than for the employed, and the risk climbs the longer the unemployment lasts. Depression rates among the long-term unemployed are roughly three times the general population. Marriages fail under the financial stress. None of this is metaphor. These are bodies. These are families. These are real outcomes that real people are living through right now because someone, in a building they will never enter, signed a piece of paper that made a number look better for one quarter.

This is what we mean when we say this is being done on purpose. Not by a faceless system. By people, making decisions, who could choose differently and do not.

What we declare

We declare what federal courts and the Department of Justice have already begun to call by its name: Americans are being kept out of the American job market because they are Americans. This is discrimination based on national origin and citizenship, prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Federal juries have found it. The Department of Justice has settled it, repeatedly, under the Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative. The pattern is no longer in dispute. It is being enforced too slowly, against too few of the actors involved, while the harm continues.

We declare that the lie about American technology workers ends here.

We declare that the harm is real, that it is being done on purpose, and that the people doing it know what it is costing — in foreclosed homes, in fractured families, in atrophied skills, and in lives. The accounting that treats those losses as externalities is not accounting. It is the abandonment of a sacred duty.

We declare that the fraud is fraud — and that we will name it in public, document it in public, and refuse to participate in the structures that perpetuate it.

We declare that the leadership pipeline is our responsibility to rebuild. Senior American technologists who are still in the field have an obligation to mentor, to hire, to develop the next generation, and to stop pretending that the system that excluded them from continuing their own careers is a system worth defending.

We declare that boards have a duty of care, that Caremark and Van Gorkom mean what they say, and that workforce strategies built on captive labor and offshore dependency violate that duty whether or not the violation has yet been litigated.

We declare that the IT staffing industry, as currently practiced, is structurally fraudulent and must be reformed. The fixes are not exotic. Customer companies should be able to verify that the person bidding for the work is the person who will perform the work. Workers should be paid at a transparent and meaningful fraction of what the customer is being charged, with subcontracting markups disclosed and capped. Identity verification, resume verification, and rate-disclosure obligations already exist in other regulated industries; there is no defensible reason IT staffing should be exempt from them. The current arrangement, where bait-and-switch and resume fraud are open industry practices, exists because it has not been required to be otherwise.

We declare that because the existing staffing channel has been corrupted to the point of no longer functioning as advertised — actively filtering out Americans on behalf of the same vendors profiting from the exclusion — clean alternatives must exist, must be visible, and must be reachable by the customers who would otherwise be defrauded. American Tech Workers will publish open standards for ethical American technology staffing — verified identities, real resumes, transparent rates, no hidden subcontracting, American workers serving American customers who can audit the entire chain — and will publicly recognize firms that meet those standards. We are not entering the staffing business. We are setting the standards the staffing business has refused to set for itself, and we will name the firms that meet them so customers can find them. The way to put a corrupt channel out of business is to make the clean channel impossible to overlook.

We declare that this is a national security threat, not only a labor market problem. The technical labor pool that builds American commercial technology is the same technical labor pool that maintains American military systems. The actors degrading the first are degrading the second on the same timeline, and the consequences of that degradation will not be reversible by the time they are felt.

We declare that this is also tax fraud against the federal treasury. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 restored immediate expensing for domestic research and development under Section 174, while retaining a 15-year amortization for foreign research and development. The companies misclassifying offshore R&D work as something other than what it is — to avoid the foreign-amortization rule and capture the domestic-expensing benefit they did not earn — are committing the same fraud they are committing on the LCA, on a different federal form, against a different federal agency, for the same financial reason. The Internal Revenue Service now has a direct, calculable, statutory financial interest in the same patterns this Declaration names. We expect that interest to be enforced.

We declare that this is not a political fight. It is a fiduciary one, a legal one, a generational one, and — because of the labor pool overlap above — a national security one. American technology workers are not asking for protection. We are demanding the enforcement of laws that already exist, on behalf of a workforce that has done nothing to deserve being routed out of its own industry.

Sign on

This declaration stands open to every American technology worker — current, recently displaced, and aspiring — and to every individual, professional association, labor organization, civic group, employer, and elected official willing to put their name to it.

The fastest way to add your endorsement is to make it public, under your own name, on your own platform, citing the URL of this declaration. Public endorsements outweigh private ones — they can be quoted, counted, organized, and built on. Endorsements are being recorded.