The future of work

And its sordid past

This week, the United States government made an emphatic statement: the country does not need any more skilled immigrants. Sounds pretty dramatic, I know. But the decision to order all immigrants, legal and illegal, to return to their home countries while they await green card interviews, is effectively that. They’re saying, “We don’t really need you anymore. We’re going to be rude until you get what we’re trying to tell you.” It’s almost certain that this will be challenged in courts and eventually be settled in the US Supreme Court. My guess: the government will win this because it gets to set the rules and there is nothing in the US constitution that protects the rights of non-citizens. But the writing is on the wall. If they don’t succeed at this, they will find another way. The inevitable can only be delayed but not stopped.

Why the sudden hostility in a country that once prided itself as “built by immigrants”? I could say that there is a bit of racism (“America is becoming too non-white”), a bit of religious bigotry (“America is becoming too Catholic or too non-Christian”) and perhaps even some linguistic chauvinism (“Not enough speak English properly anymore”). There is another unsaid aspect to this: in reality, we do not need skilled immigrants anymore, thanks to the super boost in productivity that AI promises.

In fact, there’s anxiety that a large part of the existing workforce, made up primarily of citizens, might not find work as AI disrupts traditional job sectors. Foreigners on legal work visas comprise only 1-2% of the workforce, and illegal workers about 4-5%. 90% of the workforce are native born or naturalized US citizens and green card holders. They are at risk from losing their jobs to AI. So, the predicament of non-citizens is likely to be furthest from their minds as citizens vote in elections in the coming decades.

If you are a student or a H1B worker or here in some other temporary capacity with an intent to immigrate to the US and eventually become a US citizen, I’d urge extreme caution at this point. It might be time to rethink your strategy. Canada, pockets of Europe, Australia, Dubai and Singapore are other options. Sad to say, these countries too might eventually follow the American lead as they too will have to grapple with the impact of AI.

It feels like we are headed towards a troubling, turbulent phase in the world in the decades to come. There was a time when we were told to somehow find a way to complete a college degree, and then good things would follow. If you were in America, good things meant a well-paying job, a house in the burbs, a car or two, and the ability to save for retirement, all the while having a decent vacation or two once in a while. When I was an intern at Ford Motor Company in 1996, one of my mentors was a foreman, a Black man who worked on the assembly line. He taught me a few things about where Ford spent its money on new car development. He graduated high school and joined Ford. He had been at it for 40 years by the time I met him. He was making about $150K a year (I asked him and he told me), a handsome amount of money in 1996. When Ford asked me (with a master’s degree in engineering and an MBA) to join full time, they offered me around $75k a year (plus benefits and bonus), to put things in perspective. That was the promise: You, the citizen, do your part and we will do our part.

It has all been steadily falling apart since 1996. A few years later, many of the Ford jobs moved to Mexico. Robotic automation has been making its way into manufacturing over the decades. Mechanical arms have replaced human ones. Blue collar jobs faded, adding urgency to the call for college degrees. And now, we’re here in 2026 where even the much-vaunted college diploma is rapidly losing its luster.

At some level, it’s inexplicable why we keep doing these things to ourselves. At another level, I know the answer: progress and advancement. The only way to move forward is to leave the past behind. Free enterprise and human innovation must be celebrated. All true. It’s also true that much pain and grief are left in their wake.

I turned down Ford’s offer in 1996. I chose to move to the Silicon Valley. There was a palpable excitement even back then that big changes (hint: the Internet) were afoot and it was better to be on the side that was leading the change than on the side absorbing it. 30 years later, I now wonder if it was all that it was cracked up to be. When I was at Cisco, we built the global internet connecting peoples all over the world. I had a rush of adrenaline every morning coming into work. We were changing the world by dissolving boundaries and connecting people. We also ended up creating a network that would allow any job to be done anywhere in the world. Sure enough, a vast number of white-collar jobs moved to India, China , Vietnam and the like over the next 30 years.

They told us each time we did something crazy like build cars or generate electricity or build computers or the internet, it was “for the overall good.” It was largely true. Old jobs died but many more new jobs arrived in their place. No one looks back at 1996 in America and thinks of it as a year of anxiety and fear. It was actually a pretty fun year (for most people). The vibe of 2026 doesn’t quite feel the same. It feels pretty dystopian now.

Here’s the weirdest part of it all. I actually never cared much about working. I did it only because there was no other way to feed myself. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Millions, I’m sure, feel this way. Hanging around indoors for 10 hours a day in artificial lighting isn’t anyone’s idea of fun. We all grinned and bore it. I remember many a time looking around the room in the middle of a serious meeting filled with all sorts of big wigs discussing some inanity or the other and thinking that I was caught in a twilight zone. Suffice it say that I began waiting to retire a few years after I started working.

If you take all of what we call work, I’d guess about 10% of it is genuinely admirable and done by genuinely talented people. Think breakthroughs for a cancer cure or making a really great movie or defending someone’s dignity and rights or saving a person’s life in an operation theater. A good part (60%) is necessary but boring. Think hauling away garbage, keeping the lights on and pretty much any corporate job you can think of. A good 30% is unnecessary, let alone mind-numbingly idiotic. Think US Congress, whatever Trump is doing at any point in time, office politics and any other BS you can think of.

If you think about it this way, will we really miss work? I think not. What we are going to miss are our paychecks and a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day from having done something a random piece of software was going to anyway take over 30 years down the road.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. There is this faint voice inside somewhere that tells me we’re going to figure it all out. We always do. It’s our strength as humans. We figure things out. We have never once destroyed ourselves completely. Yet.

Have a good weekend!