Visa mills to censorship machine

On 8 October, the US Department of Labour halted the Permanent Labour Certification (PERM) process for major outsourcing firms, including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, following remarks by Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling describing their operations as predatory "visa mills". Federal regulators cited systemic wage suppression and lottery manipulation designed to monopolise skilled worker quotas. With an employment-based green card backlog exceeding one million Indians and waits spanning decades, foreign staff remain bound to sponsoring employers with virtually no pathway to citizenship.

It began in 1989, when an unreviewed, highly lobbied National Science Foundation study sparked panic in Washington by forecasting a catastrophic shortfall of 675,000 scientists and engineers. Exploiting this fabricated crisis, lobbyists pushed Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, which birthed the H-1B visa.

Instead of plugging a domestic skills gap, the Act gave Indian IT conglomerates the legal architecture to construct an industrial-scale labour cartel. By flooding the visa lottery to monopolise the pipeline, these outsourcing firms laid the demographic foundation of Silicon Valley's caste-based backend. Caste matters here because the claim of indentured servitude matters, and this demographic onslaught normalises discrimination at home and whitewashes Narendra Modi abroad.

Bear in mind three facts. Technology platforms are the new media. New citizens of Western nations were long expected to leave their prejudices behind, yet caste belied that. And this diaspora has played a critical role in normalising Modi abroad.

Begin with Modi's coverage. When you are accused, as chief executive of a state, of overseeing the mass murder of two thousand humans, mostly from a minority community, including invalids, pregnant women and children, it takes a lot to remove such charges from public memory, media coverage and search engines. Yet that is what happened after 2014. I covered the 2002 Gujarat riots from my desk in Islamabad and can tell you the outrage in the Western media was palpable. So what changed in America to make it forget? Quick answer: these visa mills changed how such things were viewed or tracked. You need to bend the system and keep covering such a massive hole with inane stories, permanently altering your input criteria.

On the surface, this is an immigration scandal. In reality, it is the unmasking of a thirty-year Trojan Horse. By September 2015, Modi had found willing accomplices on the inside. Travelling through Silicon Valley, he dazzled tech giants with the promise of a billion-user "Digital India". A silent quid pro quo was established: market access in exchange for algorithmic compliance.

I saw this firsthand in 2016. As Indian security forces blinded hundreds of protesting Kashmiri civilians with pellet guns, the digital record was systematically sanitised. Image searches for Kashmir were flooded with serene tourist vistas; the carnage was buried. When I wrote columns exposing this algorithmic whitewashing, my own search visibility would dynamically contract, throttled until I stopped, only to squeeze again when I resumed. Bing and Facebook, in those early days, did not do this. Google, whose backend engineering and product teams were heavily populated by the diaspora, did. This was never an external hack by a troll farm in New Delhi. This was internal curation.

Silicon Valley was primed to accommodate this censorship because its workforce had been captured decades earlier. India did not merely export code; it exported a demographic monopoly and an ancient psychological neurosis. In India, caste is the bedrock from which all other prejudices flow. When a tiny Savarna minority, barely 15 to 20 per cent, commands nearly all institutional wealth and cultural prestige, it lives in perpetual existential insecurity. Whatever strengthens the hierarchy, be it Modi's strongman politics or violent suppression at home, becomes entirely kosher.

When Silicon Valley outsourced its technical workforce to this elite, that siege mentality was hardcoded into the global internet. Dalits, protected by constitutional quotas since the 1950s, formed a narrow but courageous pipeline into engineering, over 67 per cent of whom would later report workplace discrimination in American tech firms, according to Equality Labs. The Shudra working-class majority, 60 per cent of India, was missing altogether. Denied quotas at institutions like the IITs until 2008, they missed the H-1B boom. When Shudra engineers reached California in the 2010s, the boardrooms were closed and their visas and green cards were held hostage by the upper-caste managerial monopoly they sought to escape. An engineering class animated by caste anxiety trained algorithms to suppress dissent, erase the Shudra majority and delete political opposition from view.

It matters because technology dictates the cognitive boundaries of the modern world. When its gatekeepers normalise graded inequality, they hack the moral software of Western democracy. If students watch corporate titans and university administrators treat ancient hierarchies with deferential indulgence, they absorb a chilling lesson: that supremacy is merely culture. Once hereditary inequality is normalised, every other supremacist ideology, from white nationalism to the darkest impulses of early 20th-century Europe, looks coherent.

To protect this apparatus offline, a diaspora lobbying pincer was unleashed. The Hindu American Foundation deployed legal intimidation, while the Coalition of Hindus of North America weaponised digital outrage to kill anti-discrimination bills like California's SB 403. The chilling effect paralysed Western politics. Zohran Mamdani, celebrated as a champion of the working class, cancelled an appearance at the Shri Guru Ravidass Temple in Queens, a prominent Dalit Sikh Gurdwara, during his 2025 mayoral campaign. Imagine even our fiercest princes of light cannot step foot inside an egalitarian shrine for fear of offending upper-caste political capital.

Now the Faustian bargain is unravelling. Tech barons believed that capitulating to New Delhi's censorship requests was the price of a lucrative market. Their own operations now risk being overrun by counterfeits propped up by the Modi government and Indian oligarchs. With Washington's suspension of green card processing for the major IT conglomerates, the racket stands named for what it is: visa mills built on indentured labour. The West imported cheap engineers to write code and got a feudal hierarchy that captured its digital public square, sanitised historical atrocities and built a global censorship machine.

The fight on Delhi streets today is as much for your freedoms and survival as for India's.