The Great Indian Tech Myth Exposed

Americans built America and Indians can only break it

The most common defense of mass immigration is that America needs immigrants because they’re so much smarter or hard-working than actual Americans. Mass Indian immigration is sold to us as a good thing because every Indian is a potential Turing or Von Braun waiting to unleash their limitless potential, which they mysteriously can’t do in their own country, which despite being full of super-geniuses, has a GDP per capita of less than $3,000, just narrowly missing out on being one of the 50 poorest nations in the world.

This isn’t true. I’ve already tackled the argument in favor of mass immigration in general (which you can read here), so I’m going to debunk the notion that Indian immigration represents some untapped reservoir of human capital that meanie nativists want to shut down. Indians are less intelligent than Americans on average, they have fewer skills, and they engage in rampant fraud and ethnic nepotism to cover both of these up. Not only do we not need Indians, mass Indian immigration is harming America’s economic and technological progress.

The Cognitive Ceiling: Indians Are Dumber Than Americans

As much as certain ideologues don’t want to hear it, IQ is one of the foundational elements of societal success. On the personal level, you need a high IQ to work intellectually demanding jobs, and on the macro level, high IQs are necessary to build a functioning society. There is an extremely strong correlation between average IQ and GDP per capita, with low IQ countries, at best, able to maneuver their way into middle-income status, a la Mexico. India’s average IQ is 76, which is in the bottom quartile of global IQ and is only one point higher than the recognized threshold for mental retardation. In contrast, the average American IQ is 97.

Keep in mind that due to how averages work, India having a mean IQ of 76 means that half of all Indians have an IQ lower than 76. This is not a nation of budding geniuses; it’s a nation of janitors. The 76-IQ figure comes from a 2019 study; a more recent study puts the mean Indian IQ at 88 and the mean American IQ at 102, which is still a massive gap between the two countries. That same study also pegs the average IQ of Mexico at 89, and nobody with even a molecule of honesty in their body tries to sell Mexicans as being uniquely gifted in tech or science.

The myth of Indians being intelligent is a holdover from earlier waves of immigration; the 2003 New Immigrant Survey estimated the average IQ of Indian-Americans at 112. The disparity between Indian-American IQ and overall Indian IQ can be explained by the fact that it was primarily elite Indians who historically emigrated to the U.S. In short, all the intelligent Indians already came here decades ago. There is nobody left in India but the dregs of society.

Poor IQ in the developing world is usually explained away by endemic malnutrition, war, social instability, the lingering effects of European imperialism, or any number of other factors. The problem with this argument is that there are any number of nonwhite nations who suffered these problems and yet rose to become developed countries. Japan was left a total ruin at the end of World War II, its economy devastated and its cities nuked, yet it recovered rapidly to become one of the world’s dominant powers by the 1980s. Both of the IQ studies referenced above rank Japan’s average IQ as 106 and 109, respectively.

There’s really no way to sugarcoat this: India is poor because Indians are dumb. Studies have shown that individuals below an IQ of 83 not only cannot be trained for anything useful, their efforts actually harm those around them. If Indians were intelligent enough to innovate on their own—as the pro-immigration lobby insists they are—they would have already made their own country into a paradise. Adding a drop of sewage to a bottle of wine ruins the whole bottle. The immigration lobby wants us to dump an entire bucket of sewage into the American wine casket.

Americans Can Do the Jobs That Indians Do

To hear it from the pro-immigration lobby, Indians step off the plane into the U.S. and immediately go on to discover the cure for cancer or invent a new math equation that gets us one step closer to AGI. This is a shameless lie. The vast majority of Indians coming over via H-1Bs and other visas are employed in routine work that Americans already have the skillset for.

The website Jobs.Now catalogues job openings that corporations try to reserve for H-1Bs and other foreigners by deliberately obscuring them from public view. Existing visa law only allows corporations to sponsor H-1Bs etc. if no American citizen applicants for a job can be found. One common way corporations game this is by only listing job positions in print newspapers, which no one—particularly those employed in the tech sector—read. Here is an example from a Connecticut newspaper:

As you can see, in the case of the Quest Global Services job positions, they cannot be applied for via the corporation’s website, only via email (and rather comically, “H1B” is in the contact email address). Here is another example from the San Francisco Chronicle:

This job position from Volkswagen doesn’t even allow applicants to submit via email, but requires them to physically mail their resumes like it’s 1985. By making these job positions difficult to access and apply for, corporations can then claim they need H-1Bs because they were unable to find American applicants…despite them making it nearly impossible for Americans to apply.

Jobs.Now seeks out these hidden job positions and lists them on its website, allowing Americans to obtain these jobs. Here is a recent job posting for a software developer for Centraprise Corporation in Irving, Texas:

Design & develop scalable software applications using Java, Python, & JavaScript within Agile/Scrum environments. Create responsive UIs using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript, & implement secure user access controls. Work with Power BI, SQL, & authorization models to support compliance & data governance. Build CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Kubernetes & Docker in cloud-based, centralized environments (AWS, GCP, Azure). Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design cloud & big data solutions, troubleshoot software issues, & enhance system performance using monitoring tools.

Master’s in Science, Technology, or Engineering (any); Information Systems is required.

Mail resume: HR, Centraprise Corp, 6655 Deseo Dr, Ste 108, Irving, TX 75039

There is nothing about these job positions that requires foreign labor. These are all routine tech positions that plenty of Americans are qualified for but are not getting because corporations would rather hire Indians, who they can underpay and abuse. Further proof of this can be seen in the fact that for all the boomer Con, Inc. jokes about young people being unemployed because they got degrees in “underwater basket-weaving,” STEM majors have a higher unemployment rate then college graduates with “useless” liberal arts degrees:

I myself have spoken to many young STEM graduates who are unable to find work. It’s not because they’re unskilled. It’s because they’re Americans. This isn’t even getting into the large numbers of Indians who are employed in positions like trucking or retail. Research shows that foreign labor has a negative effect on American wages. If Indians weren’t underpaid relative to Americans, not a single Indian would be allowed to emigrate to the U.S.

Often forgotten in the H-1B debate is that a type of visa already exists for the “geniuses” that the pro-immigration lobby insist we need: the O-1 visa. O-1s are issued to foreigners who demonstrate “extraordinary ability” in fields from science to sports to the arts. Except Indians have begun cheating this system as well through hiring ghostwriters to write fake research articles for them, then having them published in a network of fraudulent Indian “peer-reviewed” journals.

The teeming hordes coming over from India will not give us the next Wernher von Braun. They are glorified slaves doing jobs Americans can do better and are employed not for their skills, but for their willingness to accept wage theft and abuse under threat of deportation.

How Indians Fake Their Credentials to Get Jobs They’re Unqualified For

Beyond the aforementioned O-1 visa fraud, Indians have a nasty habit of outright faking their educational credentials. There have been numerous examples of Indian universities allowing students to outright buy their degrees, a problem present across fields from tech to medicine. While this problem is not limited to India, Indians make up the largest number of phony college graduates by far.

Plagiarism among foreign students has been a problem in American higher education since at least the 2000s. In 2010, Ed Dante wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education detailing his work as an academic ghostwriter, authoring everything from English composition assignments to master’s theses for college students who were either incapable of doing their own work or too lazy to put in the effort. In his article (and a book he later published, The Shadow Scholar), he named foreign students from China, India, and other third-world countries as one of his largest client bases, noting that in many cases, their English was so poor that they should have been refused admission to university in the first place.

I myself worked as an academic ghostwriter intermittently for a number of firms from 2014 to 2024 and my observations line up with Dante’s. For most of that time, ghostwriting clients fell into one of three demographics: lazy rich kids, black single mothers at for-profit schools like Grand Canyon University, and foreign students from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, China, and Africa. Additionally, the majority of clients were women. Beginning in 2022, however, there was an explosion of Indian male clients attending schools in Canada and the U.S., enough so that it tipped the traditional gender ratio to 50/50. Plagiarism has become so endemic at some universities that employers have begun blacklisting their graduates due to the likelihood that the students obtained their degrees fraudulently. Here is an example from Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario:

Professors aren’t stupid. When a Chinese or Indian student who can barely speak enough English to have a conversation suddenly starts turning in grammatically perfect, well-written work, the only explanation is plagiarism. Professors say nothing despite plagiarism being an expellable offense because Indians and other foreigners can simply accuse them of racism. Additionally, colleges profit immensely off of foreign students and expelling them en masse would deprive them of much-needed revenue. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, there was some attention given to the issue of students using it to cheat on their coursework, but no action was taken to choke off the supply of foreign plagiarists.

Indians have also been known to inflate or fake their credentials in other ways. Indian-run bodyshops have been caught stealing resumes from qualified job applicants, changing the names, and then giving them to unqualified Indians to help them get jobs. When it comes to the interview process, Indians have been caught hiring other Indians to complete interviews for them, selecting Indians who physically resemble them in order to fool employers via Zoom calls:

If you’ve ever wondered why every job now requires a ridiculous, drawn-out three-stage interview process, this might have something to do with it.

Indians and other third worlders engage in this fraudulent activity because they do not interpret truth and reality in the same way as Americans. To an Indian or Chinese person, having a credential is more important than acquiring knowledge, thus cheating to obtain a college degree or job is seen as perfectly acceptable and even “clever” (to use the English translation of the Indian word “jugaad”). This behavior is ingrained in their societies and has poisoned the well for genuinely talented individuals from these countries. When nine out of ten Indians cheat their way to a bachelor’s degree, how can any Indian be trusted?

Immigrants Didn’t Build America’s Tech Industry, Americans Did

A common trope from the immigration lobby is that Silicon Valley was built by immigrants. The only evidence for this comes from anecdote, e.g. “ELON MUSK WAS AN IMMIGRANT!” In reality, America’s tech industry was built by Americans, for Americans, and immigrants played a limited role at best, with Indian immigrants playing almost no role.

Tech’s origins are in American-built firms and the military. The Internet itself stems from ARPANET, a project initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a wing of the Department of Defense. ARPANET was the brainchild of American programmers like Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, with little to no involvement from immigrants. This makes sense given that as a military project, national security was paramount, and ARPANET began development in the 1960s, when the U.S. immigrant population was tiny.

The leading tech firms that built Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s were primarily American-founded and led, such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft. While immigrants have contributed to Silicon Valley, their contributions are dwarfed by native-born Americans, many of whom came from Middle American states like Alabama, Nebraska, or West Virginia, places that are stereotyped as being full of dumb inbreds. West Virginia in particular has a long legacy in American engineering, being the home of groundbreaking NASA engineers Homer Hickam and Katherine Johnson, the latter of whom was one of the subjects of the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Moreover, the immigrants who have left lasting legacies in American tech disproportionately come from European or East Asian countries, with Indians having very little impact. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is from Russia, former Intel CEO Andy Grove was from Hungary, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang is from Taiwan, and Elon Musk is from South Africa. Mass immigration lobbyists will point to more recent Indian entrants into Silicon Valley such as Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, but the evidence shows that Indians are, at best, capable of maintaining existing tech firms but cannot innovate on their own. Even this is questionable, as it was under the influence of Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan, former head of Google’s advertising division, that Google deliberately crippled its search capabilities in order to sell more ads.

Report after report I’ve fielded from insiders in the tech industry shows that the bulk of Indians are unqualified for tech jobs. It’s not uncommon for Indian contractors to struggle for months to solve problems that an American can fix within hours or days. There is even evidence that Indian tech contractors will deliberately leave things broken in order to create more work and justify their positions. If you’re wondering why your Windows 11 laptop is less functional than an IBM 386 from the early 90s despite being exponentially more “advanced,” you know who to blame.

Only Americans Can Make America Great Again

America is unique in that it possesses virtually everything it needs to be a self-sufficient nation. In terms of resources, our natural wealth in terms of raw materials, energy, agriculture and the like is such that we could seal ourselves off from the world and aside from limited trading with Canada, we would be fine. America is also rich in human capital, not because of immigrants, but because of Americans themselves, who are the most capable and intelligent people on the planet. America became the world superpower in the post-World War II era, during a time when immigration had collapsed to near-zero due to the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, because Americans have the brains and the grit to get things done, along with a bounty of natural resources that fuel our industry.

We don’t need Indians or anyone else to make America great again, particularly given the moribund state of the economy, with large numbers of recent graduates unable to find work. With a handful of exceptions, most of the immigrants coming in, legal or illegal, are economic and societal dead weight. If Trump is serious about the “Golden Age of America,” closing the borders to all immigrants, including so-called “high-skilled” ones, is necessary.

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