I am proud to lead the only pro-worker investment firm in America. It’s called Azoria. At first, a “pro-worker investment firm” sounds contradictory. Wall Street claims that you can’t be pro-worker and pro-profits. Their “thinking” is this: when you fire Americans and hire cheap foreign labor, you boost profits. It sounds logical—but it’s dead wrong. Empirically, when a company lays off American workers and announces plans to hire foreign labor through the H-1B visa program, its stock usually pops. But that reaction is short-sighted. You can’t maximize long-term returns by weakening the foundation that creates them: American labor. Markets have been trained to cheer these announcements because Wall Street still sees American labor as a liability, not the source of value that it has always been. To understand why that matters, start with what sets American labor apart from foreign labor (H-1B, for example). First: mobility. American workers can leave an employer if they are underpaid or underutilized and join one where they can be more productive. They can move between industries, relocate across states, and apply their skills wherever they’re most effective. Economists call this “labor market mobility”—the ability of talent to flow to its highest and best use. That’s what keeps an economy dynamic. Workers who leave a stagnant firm like Intel to join an innovator like Nvidia aren’t just advancing their own careers—they’re reallocating human capital toward the frontier of productivity. That movement is how innovation spreads through an economy. H-1B workers don’t have that freedom. Their legal status is tied to a single employer. If they leave or are fired, they lose their visa and must leave the country. That dependence keeps them stuck in place. It suppresses wages, discourages innovation, and prevents labor from reallocating where it would be most productive. At the macro level, low labor mobility slows productivity growth. Workers remain trapped in less efficient firms, while the most dynamic ones struggle to hire the talent they need. Over time, this misallocation lowers aggregate output, reduces wage growth, and makes the entire economy less adaptive to technological change. A country with an immobile labor force cannot innovate at scale. Second: allegiance. American workers live and spend in the same economy their companies serve. They buy the products they help design, pay taxes that fund the infrastructure their employers rely on, and understand the competition because they use it. They have skin in the game. Their incentives are aligned with the long-term success of their company and their country. Foreign workers imported through the H-1B pipeline aren’t anchored in the same way. Their consumption, financial commitments, and sense of loyalty remain abroad—as reflected in billions of dollars in annual remittances sent out of the U.S. economy. A nation increasingly reliant on risk-averse foreign labor—whose ties, families, and futures lie elsewhere—suffers a quiet economic drag. The economy subtly tilts toward preservation rather than creation. When those who build and design the nation’s products are not invested in its long-term success, growth is held back, and all companies suffer accordingly. Third: merit. The H-1B system allows companies to bypass qualified American applicants entirely. There is no rule requiring that a single American be interviewed before hiring a foreign worker. That means entire categories of American talent can be excluded from consideration solely for being citizens of their own country. That is not meritocratic—it is structural discrimination against domestic labor. The problem goes deeper. Because the H-1B system is run through a network of intermediaries—offshore staffing firms and labor brokers—it relies heavily on self-reported credentials. Fraud and exaggeration are common, and verification is often impossible due to distance, language barriers, and the complicity of the firms supplying the labor. In many cases, the same entities that file the visa petitions are the ones inflating résumés and falsifying references. The result isn’t a search for the most qualified worker—it’s a search for the cheapest one. At scale, that erodes human-capital formation across the entire economy. When firms compete on labor arbitrage rather than skill, the incentive to invest in education, apprenticeships, and training weakens. Over time, the nation’s collective stock of knowledge declines, wage growth stagnates, and productivity falls short of potential. Taken together, these three forces reinforce one another. A less mobile, less allegiant, and less meritocratic labor market produces slower productivity, weaker innovation, and lower real income growth. The nation becomes more fragile. This is why Azoria is launching an ETF that excludes public companies grossly reliant on foreign labor, and invests exclusively in companies that hire and elevate American labor. Our thesis is simple: American workers are indispensable to innovation. Investing in Americans is good for business and America. James T. Fishback CEO, Azoria Capital, Inc. Madison, FL cc: @RenMacLLC @NateAFischer
