Research Brief
America is now importing far more people than the number of new jobs we create each year. We add roughly 1.5–2 million jobs annually, yet recent years have brought in over 3 million new documented immigrants per year. Our labor supply is growing faster than the economy can absorb, building in a permanent wage squeeze and making it harder for American workers to find stable, well-paid careers.
Why this is a crisis for American workers
Stat spotlight (illustrative scale)
Each year, the U.S. creates only ~1.5–2M new jobs… while producing ~3.0M high school completers, ~3.0M new undergraduate degrees, and receiving ~2.8M net immigrants. This is a built-in labor glut.
In a 30-second clip, viewers instantly see the imbalance: a tiny bar for new jobs — overwhelmed by a massive flow of new workers. This is not a “skills shortage.” It is deliberately engineered labor oversupply.
And these figures don’t even capture the millions of Americans still chasing stable employment — the officially unemployed, the underemployed working part-time, and those who quietly stopped searching because they believe no jobs exist. As of September 2025 there are about 7.4 million unemployed, plus another 6.4 million people not in the labor force who say they want a job. Add to that several million more working in part-time or under-utilized roles. The real pool of Americans needing a career likely totals well over 10–15 million, further amplifying the gap between available work and available workers in today’s oversupplied labor market.
Put it all together and the picture becomes undeniable:
America produces only
~2 million new jobs a year, while more than
~22 million workers (3M immigrants + 19M Americans) need real jobs (i.e. careers)
This is not a shortage of workers, it is a national labor flood that has tipped the economy against our own people.
This is our battle plan to flip the script and put American workers 1st again.
When employers report shortages, we don’t default to visas — we launch a 30–60 day American upskilling sprint.
If a foreign worker is truly necessary, the visa is only approved if the employer commits to pairing them with an American apprentice.
We give priority access to Californians who need opportunity the most:
This is how we lift our own people into the middle class instead of importing workers who skip past the financial struggles Californians endure every day.
Training Americans reduces long-term government spending:
Every American we lift into stable work reduces public assistance costs, shrinks bureaucracies, strengthens our tax base, and beats importing labor every time.
When California employers face a legitimate skills shortage, our first move will not be to reach for a visa form. It will be to reach for a 30–60 day upskilling sprint for American workers who already have adjacent skills – especially in tech, engineering, and data. If a job can be learned in roughly a month of focused training, then California will treat that as an opportunity for our people, not a pretext to import cheaper labor.
For more complex roles, we will flip the current model: whenever a temporary foreign worker is truly needed, the employer will be required to pair that worker with an American apprentice. That apprentice will shadow, train, and gradually take over the role by the time the visa ends – a framework inspired by our separate project AmericanLaborDefense.org .
If no Americans apply to upskill or apprentice – even with transparent postings, fair pay, and state-supported training – then we will treat that position as a documented, genuine skills gap. In those rare cases, we will welcome the foreign worker as a true teammate, not a replacement. The rule is simple:
This policy keeps the door open for genuine global talent, while making sure that no Californian is quietly displaced in the shadows of a rigged system. Upskill first. Apprentice before import. Hire American as the default.
The H-1B program was sold as a way to fill rare “skill gaps.” In reality, it has been weaponized by powerful corporations and outsourcing firms to displace American workers, suppress wages, and treat American talent as disposable.
Federal law says H-1B visas are supposed to help employers when they genuinely can’t find needed skills in the U.S. workforce. In practice, the program has been captured by large tech firms and labor-substitution companies that use visa workers as a cheaper parallel workforce, with no real requirement to recruit Americans first.
Independent researchers have documented widespread wage underpayment and high use of the lowest “prevailing wage” levels in H-1B filings, creating a race-to-the-bottom pay scale that undercuts both American workers and the H-1B workers themselves. Cases like Disney and Southern California Edison exposed a brutal reality: American IT workers forced to train their foreign replacements before being laid off.
Meanwhile, demand for H-1B slots remains far above the 85,000 annual cap, and the majority of visas in recent years have been concentrated in a narrow band of firms and sectors, especially Big Tech and IT outsourcing. California, as the global hub of software and AI, bears the brunt of this distortion.
Note: These protections extend to all employer practices involving guestworker categories such as OPT, L-1, H-4 EAD, CPT, and other visa-based programs frequently used to displace American workers. While states cannot regulate visa issuance itself, California can aggressively regulate the labor behavior surrounding these programs — including wage suppression schemes, fraudulent job classifications, retaliatory layoffs, sham “talent shortages,” and the use of foreign staffing pipelines to displace qualified Americans. Any employer using these programs must comply with California’s strengthened labor, disclosure, and anti-displacement laws, or face felony charges, civil clawbacks, and full state enforcement. California will become the model for how states defend their people from systemic labor exploitation.
Corporations quietly offshore entire departments to low-wage countries, replacing Californians with cheaper overseas labor while still selling their products and services back to the people they pushed out. Visa abuse is the inside attack; offshoring is the outside escape hatch. Together they form one rigged system that strips Americans of the careers they built.
While visa abuse displaces workers inside California, offshoring displaces them outside our borders entirely. Corporations move engineering, support, design, finance, and IT roles overseas where wages are far lower, then sell those same products and services back to the Californians whose careers were eliminated. This is not innovation — it’s wage arbitrage. And it is destroying the American middle class.
From tech giants to outsourcing firms, offshoring has become a business model: transfer as much work as possible abroad, cut payroll costs, and hide the damage behind layers of subcontractors. Entire teams of Californians have been replaced by cheaper overseas labor with no public disclosure, no accountability, and no responsibility to the communities they harmed.
California has the power to stop subsidizing this race-to-the-bottom. If companies want California tax credits, infrastructure, universities, customers, and data — they must keep the jobs here, with our people. Offshoring should disqualify firms from state benefits, trigger clawbacks, and immediately place them on a public “Offshoring Watchlist” so voters know exactly who is loyal to the workers of this state.
our commitment is simple:
California will become the state that stands up to this
rigged system with data, law, and relentless enforcement — while building a
powerful pipeline for our own people into AI, software, and advanced tech.
our administration should treat offshoring the same way we treat wage fraud or tax evasion — as a direct attack on California’s economic security. Firms that offshore will face automatic penalties, clawbacks, and exposure. Firms that hire Americans will be rewarded. This is how we rebuild the middle class.
Build a real-time public dashboard showing which companies in California use H-1B and other guestworker programs, how many positions, which occupations, and at what prevailing wage levels. No more secrecy; every voter sees who is really hiring whom.
Condition state contracts, tax credits, and subsidies on strict “no replacement” clauses: no using guestworkers or offshore outsourcing firms to lay off existing California employees while taking public money.
Use data engineering and AI to ingest Labor Condition Applications, wage data, and layoff records to flag employers whose patterns suggest wage suppression or mass replacement of American workers for investigation.
Create a California H-1B Abuse Whistleblower Fund to support Americans (and visa workers) who come forward with evidence of illegal replacement, underpayment, or retaliation — with strong anti-blacklisting protections.
Launch a California-first apprenticeship pipeline that takes displaced or underemployed engineers, veterans, and self-taught coders and moves them into AI, cloud, and cybersecurity roles with on-the-job training instead of debt.
If a firm receiving state benefits offshores key technical work or replaces Californians with lower-paid visa workers, automatic clawbacks, surtaxes, and public disclosure are triggered. You don’t get to loot the state and hide.
Form a specialized team inside the Governor’s office to draft and push state laws, within constitutional limits, that close loopholes, coordinate with federal investigators, and relentlessly defend our workers.
Align state STEM funding with concrete hiring commitments from employers in California, not vague “pipelines” that end in outsourcing. If companies say they need talent, they must hire here first.
Publish annual “American Workers First” scorecards grading major employers on domestic hiring, offshoring, and use of guestworker programs. Voters, customers, and investors will see exactly who is loyal to California.
Publish company-level data on where work is actually done – in California, elsewhere in the U.S., or overseas. No more hiding layoffs behind vendor names and foreign subsidiaries.
Ban state tax credits, grants, and contracts for companies that offshore core engineering, operations, or support roles while doing business in California.
If a firm offshores jobs after taking state support, claw back benefits with interest and apply additional penalties tied to the number of jobs exported.
Maintain a public watchlist of major offshoring employers so voters, workers, and investors can see who is abandoning California and who is committed to hiring here.
Offer targeted incentives to companies that bring previously offshored work back to California and retrain displaced workers into those roles.
When firms use AI to boost profits, require job, wage, or hours guarantees in California so “efficiency” cannot be used as cover to offshore the gains overseas.
Offshoring is the hardest abuse to stop because it hides behind foreign subsidiaries, vendor chains, and opaque outsourcing contracts. The only way to eliminate it is to make offshoring so financially dangerous that no corporation would dare attempt it. California will establish a penalty system reaching up to one billion dollars per violation for companies that offshore core technical, operational, or support roles while doing business in our state.
Half of every collected penalty will be awarded to the whistleblower — whether they are a current employee, a laid-off American worker, a contractor, an accountant, or even the overseas worker who receives the offshored job. This creates unstoppable internal pressure: anyone with evidence of offshoring becomes a potential multi-millionaire. Corporations will never know which insider could expose them. This is how we permanently end the offshoring business model and restore American careers.
California will launch a specialized investigative unit known as The Trojan Horse. This task force will actively search for offshored workers and overseas contractors connected to California corporations. By analyzing public filings, vendor trails, leaked subcontractor lists, platform logs, digital fingerprints, and anonymous tips, the team will identify where entire departments have been quietly transferred abroad.
Once identified, The Trojan Horse will contact these workers directly, inform them of the billion-dollar whistleblower incentive, and guide them through secure, encrypted channels to submit evidence. Even a single screenshot, invoice, internal credential list, or subcontractor contract will be enough to expose large-scale offshoring schemes. Corporations will no longer assume that misconduct overseas will remain hidden — California will be actively discovering it, documenting it, and rewarding those who come forward.
Note: California will lead the American workforce into the future. We will encourage companies to relocate certain roles to other U.S. states when appropriate, strengthening our entire nation. As California rises, America will rise with it. Our mission will be to create new opportunity here at home — and to empower every state in our country to join us in a new era of American prosperity. When California rises, America rises.
Integrated Strategy
American Workers First is not a stand-alone idea. Each policy is like a gear. The system interlocks. When one gear turns, the whole system moves.
Lower and stabilized rents give struggling workers, homeless Californians, and early-stage founders a real shot at staying housed while they learn, work, and build. Housing stability is the foundation that makes risk-taking and entrepreneurship possible.
Enforcing anti-displacement and anti-wage-suppression rules creates the demand side: open jobs, fair wages, and real opportunities for Californians in poverty, the underemployed, and under-represented communities instead of importing temporary labor.
With treatment, shelter, and real housing, people leave survival mode and can enter training, apprenticeships, and startups. Homeless Californians can fill roles currently occupied by temp workers or even launch companies of their own when given structured support.
Redirecting money from bloated universities into self-taught builders and accelerators creates new firms that can hire the homeless, absorb displaced workers, and even build more housing. When ventures fail, these founders can still step into protected American-first jobs.
Enforcing anti-displacement and anti-wage-suppression rules creates the demand side: open jobs, fair wages, and real opportunities for Americans in poverty, the underemployed, and under-represented communities instead of importing temporary labor.
Lower and stabilized rent give struggling workers, homeless Californians, and early-stage founders a real shot at staying housed while they learn, work, and build. Housing stability is the foundation that makes risk-taking and entrepreneurship possible.
With treatment, shelter, real housing and strong leadership people leave survival mode and can enter training, apprenticeships, and startups. Homeless Californians can fill roles currently occupied by temp workers or even launch companies of their own when given structured support.
Redirecting money from bloated universities into self-taught builders and accelerators creates new firms that can hire the homeless, absorb displaced workers, and even build more housing. When ventures fail, these founders can still step into protected American-first jobs.
Think of these four policies as a Cartesian plane: each Quadrant represents a different axis of revitalization – housing stability, labor protection, human recovery, and entrepreneurial ignition. On future versions of this site, we will map real data onto that plane so Californians can see how progress in one Quadrant accelerates the others in real time.
The message is simple: no one is written off.
The homeless can become builders. Builders can create housing. Protected American
workers can found companies. And together, these four Quadrants form one integrated,
measurable plan to Revitalize California.
And a Revitalized California Will Super Power America 🇺🇸
This will not be a fight against individual immigrants. It will be a fight against a system that treats both American and visa workers as disposable. When We lead California, We will use every lawful tool our state possesses to build a future where American workers are protected, respected, and prioritized in their own country.
California will rise — and as it rises, it will lift America with it. We will become the engine of national renewal, the example other states follow, and the state that proves one truth: a strong California will supercharge a strong United States.
This is our mission. This is our duty. And together, we will build an America where hard work is honored, families can thrive, and every citizen’s effort will be rewarded — not replaced.
Note: While immigration categories are governed federally, California has full 10th Amendment authority over labor law, criminal penalties, economic protections, and enforcement inside its borders. Under this authority, California will establish the strongest anti-displacement, anti-wage-suppression, and anti-fraud protections in America — including new felony labor offenses, civil clawbacks, restitution, and executive accountability measures. These protections apply to all employers operating in the state and will set the national standard for defending American workers.