The Following Content Has Been Provided by:Amanda Bartolotta

“MENLO PARK, Calif.—One of California’s newest residents recently stepped off a plane after a 16-hour flight from New Delhi.” So reports the Wall Street Journal.

California’s ruling class wants you to believe the state is thriving again. Their elites point to a small population increase and frame it as a comeback story. The corporate press is hailing it as proof of resilience. But peel back the layers of celebration and the truth emerges, that California’s recent “growth” is less about revival and more about replacement. And one man’s story exposes the entire deception.

The poster child of this trend is a little-known Indian tech executive named Nagendra Dhanakeerthi, a 39-year-old Indian national who landed in San Francisco in May and walked into a Silicon Valley boardroom just hours later.

The Wall Street Journal elevated his arrival to a symbol of California’s rebirth, while AI Squared, the startup that imported him, positioned him as their extraordinary savior of innovation. What neither of them disclosed is how shaky the legal and factual foundation of his entry really is.

According to the Journal, Dhanakeerthi entered the United States under an O-1A visa, a classification reserved exclusively for individuals of extraordinary ability in the sciences, business or education, applicants whose work has garnered sustained national or international acclaim and must be recognized as among the very few at the top of their field.

That standard is not a formality. It is meant to reserve the program for the world’s top minds – think Nobel Prize winners, published academics or inventors with global recognition. The bar is intentionally high: Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, world-renowned academics or top 1% innovators.

But a comprehensive investigation into Dhanakeerthi’s background, professional footprint and public presence turns up no evidence that he meets these requirements. He has never won a major international award. There are no scholarly publications in his name. He has not been profiled in peer-reviewed literature or cited for groundbreaking innovation. His resume shows stints at Indian fintech firms like Razorpay and Affle, followed by co-founding a modest startup called Multiwoven, which was later acquired by AI Squared, raising immediate questions about whether the acquisition was designed to manufacture “extraordinary” status to satisfy visa requirements.

While he lists himself as a “builder” with experience in startup ecosystems, Dhanakeerthi’s actual work sits firmly in the middle tier of global tech labor, not at the apex. His inclusion in Forbes Technology Council is not a competitive accolade; it is a pay-to-join industry group known for offering “official member” status in exchange for fees. This further undermines any suggestion of elite or exclusive status.

In truth, the available record paints Dhanakeerthi as a journeyman engineer with a decent resume, but nowhere near the caliber the O-1A visa demands. The fact that he was granted this visa despite lacking the required credentials exposes how far the system has strayed from its legal intent.

AI Squared’s participation in India’s FOSS 2024 developer conference in Bengaluru also reveals deeper ties to India’s workforce export infrastructure. The startup has embraced a transnational hiring model that taps into India’s massive supply of visa-ready engineers, often displacing American talent in the process. Dhanakeerthi’s own career path, from India to Dubai to California, follows a common foreign labor funnel, often backed by Indian consultancies and recruiting firms skilled in working visa systems for maximum gain.

That’s what California is celebrating. Not opportunity for Americans, but the successful execution of a foreign labor scheme that leverages loopholes, lax enforcement and a system rigged in favor of foreign nationals over U.S. citizens.

There are thousands of equally or more qualified American engineers, many of them veterans, mid-career professionals or recent graduates who were never even given a chance. They don’t get fast-tracked into six-figure jobs with startup equity. They don’t get puff pieces in the press. Instead, they’re told to learn to code while corporate America hires abroad.

This isn’t “growth.” It’s corporate-engineered displacement, funded by companies, facilitated by foreign governments and quietly endorsed by America’s own leaders. Dhanakeerthi is not an exception. He is the template.

When Kimura said, “We paid a lot of money to get him here,” the American people should ask: Did that cost include a lawyer to exploit immigration loopholes? Did it include bypassing qualified American workers? And did it include a silent agreement that India’s interests now matter more than America’s?

While Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is publicly touting the population bump as a sign of California’s comeback, maybe he should’ve picked a better poster boy than a visa-hopping tech bro from Bangalore. If a state’s comeback story starts with a six-figure foreign import who needed a lawyer and a loophole to get the job, that’s not rebuilding, that’s outsourcing. Visa fraud and foreign labor pipelines aren’t economic wins, they’re surrender flags. This is not how to rebuild an economy. It’s how a nation’s people get replaced, one visa at a time.

And if this is Newsom’s big audition for president, someone should tell him: Propping up your state with paperwork gymnastics and Silicon Valley spin isn’t leadership, it’s globalist cosplay. America deserves better than a governor who celebrates being replaced.

Follow the American First Immigration team at WND.com
Investigating foreign influence, immigration abuse and the betrayal of America’s workers, one exposé at a time.