Politicians break promises — all of them, always. That alone isn't a finding. What's documented here is the specific gap between a stated commitment and the public record, with the receipt for each.
Click any promise to see the outcome. Colour indicates category: broken, inverted (the opposite occurred), backfired (policy produced the reverse effect), or unpromised (a major action never put to voters).
The tech-jobs argument almost always collapses into a fight about H-1B visas, and that fight is aimed at the smaller of two channels by more than an order of magnitude.
H-1B brings workers here. It is capped at 85,000 new visas a year. Those people live in the United States, pay U.S. taxes and spend in the U.S. economy. The fee was raised from roughly $5,000 to $100,000, with sharply higher rejection rates.
Offshoring sends the work there. It is capped by nothing. India now hosts more than 2,100 Global Capability Centres — wholly owned units of multinational corporations, not vendors — employing roughly 2.0 to 2.4 million professionals, up from 1.9 million in 2024, with NASSCOM projecting 2.8 million by 2030. They generate over $70 billion a year. That figure excludes the separate Indian IT services industry serving U.S. clients, which employs millions more.
And these are no longer back-office roles. Roughly 80% of centres launched in 2026 list AI and machine learning as their core mandate. The work includes product engineering, data science, cybersecurity architecture and finance transformation — the same high-value work headquarters teams do, at a 40 to 60 percent cost saving.
The crackdown made it worse. Rather than redirecting hiring to Americans, Google, Amazon and Microsoft expanded engineering operations in Bengaluru, and Bloomberg documented the U.S. losing senior technical talent to India as a direct consequence. Closing the door to workers coming here made moving the work there more attractive.
One caveat kept visible for accuracy: not every offshore role is a one-for-one American job eliminated — some are net-new positions for global operations. Economists disagree on the displacement ratio. What is not disputed is the scale of work now performed abroad for U.S. companies, or that it has grown continuously for two decades under both parties.