America has lost ~$450 billion from outsourcing IT to India in the last 6 years alone. I've worked through 15 different technology implementations for healthcare providers over the past 6 years. Small scale to enterprise level. While the data is clear on the amount of foreigners that have been given US based tech employment, what it precariously omits is the enormous scale of reliance on offshored labor. This is an opaque process to most people, even corporate Americans don't understand what is actually happening. Every single project I was involved in used Indian consultants. Scrum masters, data analysts, DevOps & SWEs, project managers - all Indian. The service team - call center reps, client managers, Their work was horrific and constantly needed micromanaging. It would take 6 Indians to complete a simple SQL pipeline for SFTP prep that an American dev could solo in half the time. Project documentation was atrocious, filled with grammatical errors making it largely undecipherable. Deliverables were always late. Firms like Deloitte, Accenture, PWC, EY, Optum and Huron all have what PWC calls "acceleration centers" where these people are employed. Primarily in India, but also in Malaysia, the Philippines and Mexico. Massive corporate buildings that cram thousands of these people to do work that would require 1/10 of the amount of Americans. I often wondered, why? The answer is simple - build a deliverable that (barely) functions but breaks enough to keep the client engaged long term. The money isn't in the project, but all the servicing behind it. Using offshore labor allows these companies to arbitrage labor cost exponentially, meaning massive profitability for shareholders. Example: A company pays Deloitte $400k to build a new inventory software system. After it’s live, they sign a 5 year support contract for $180,000 per year so Deloitte’s team fixes problems, updates it, and keeps it running. That turns a $400k project into $1.3 million total revenue for Deloitte over time. But the devil is in the details. Mostly all of development work for the inventory software is done offshore in India, where Deloitte’s developers cost the firm about $25k–$35k each instead of using American developers who cost $110k–$150k each. In that same $180k per year support contract, Deloitte will use offshore teams in India (costing the firm ~$15k–$25k) instead of Americans (who cost ~$90k–$120k). Every offshore hire means roughly $60k–$90k in American wages that never enter the U.S. economy. Over 5 years that’s $750k–$1.2m in lost U.S. wages that will never enter the American economy, from one single project. Scaling of this issue is imperative. An estimated 150,000 projects have been completed by professional firms since 2020. Low end: 150,000 × $750,000 = $112.5 billion High end: 150,000 × $1,200,000 = $180 billion However, these are only first order effects. If we account for second order (wages supporting local economy and everything downstream) we can conservatively estimate a 1x-1.5x multiplier so the real cost for America looks more like this: Low end: $112.5B × 2.0 = $225 billion High end: $180B × 2.5 = $450 billion $35-70 billion per year on IT outsourcing alone. Professional companies are expanding very rapidly on this front, largely through AI marketing slop to blissfully unaware boomer corporate executives, embedding their useless AI into their bread and butter - outsourced service model. There are virtually no indicators that anyone will do anything about this.