Research note · August 12, 2026

The work moved instead

Certified visa applications for technology jobs in the Hartford–Springfield region fell by a third between federal fiscal 2021 and 2024. Nationally, they rose. The difference is not that local employers started hiring locally—it is that the work itself is leaving.

Our dataset counts 3,124 certified Labor Condition Applications—the form an employer files before seeking an H-1B visa—for computer, IT, and data jobs located in the six-county region across fiscal 2021 through 2024. Annual filings fell from 945 to 637 in that window, and requested positions fell from 1,886 to 716. Over the same period, national certified applications rose about 3 percent. Whatever happened here was not the national trend.

Part of the explanation is arithmetic: about 58 percent of the region's applications came through IT-services and staffing firms rather than the companies where the work is used, and the large India-based services firms cut their U.S. visa hiring roughly in half over those years. A region whose tech labor arrives mostly through those firms falls faster than the country when they retreat.

Where the work went

The clearer signal is what the region's anchor employers were building while their visa filings fell. Since 2020, the insurers at the center of this dataset have each opened a captive technology center in India:

• MassMutual opened its first global capability center outside the United States in Hyderabad in 2020–21, a commitment reported at more than $120 million.
• Voya Financial converted its Bangalore joint venture into wholly owned Voya India in October 2023—technology, analytics, and operations supporting businesses anchored in Windsor, Connecticut.
• Cigna's Evernorth opened its first global capability center outside the U.S. in Hyderabad in April 2024; reports put it past 1,000 staff in 2025.
• The Hartford opened its India Technology Center in Hyderabad on September 30, 2025, focused on AI and digital engineering.

The pattern is wider than insurance. Pratt & Whitney opened an India Engineering Center in Bengaluru in 2023 working on the GTF and PT6 engine programs—the engineering anchored in East Hartford—with plans to add 450 engineers by 2027, alongside Collins Aerospace's roughly 3,000-engineer Bengaluru center. Otis runs a Bengaluru services center incorporated in 2017 under the name "Farm Springs Services Center India," after the address of its Farmington headquarters. Empower, which bought the retirement businesses formerly run from Springfield and Hartford, reports more than 3,200 employees at its Bengaluru center. And the scale runs one way: The Hartford's new domestic technology office in Columbus, Ohio holds about 75 people; its Hyderabad center plans about 1,200. We found no announcement of offshore work returning to the region between 2020 and mid-2026.

These are ordinary, lawful business decisions, publicly announced. But they answer the question falling visa numbers cannot: employers did not stop using the visa program because they placed workers locally. Increasingly, they stopped needing to bring the work here at all.

The paper trail is older than it looks

The cost logic was stated plainly at the start. In the early 2000s, an Aetna vice president told Network World the company had 200 to 600 Infosys programmers working in Bangalore—"like a remote office for us in India"—at roughly $20 an hour against $60 an hour for comparable U.S. developers. Prudential had already opened its Irish software operation for the Hartford-anchored retirement business in 2000; it passed 1,500 staff before being transferred to Tata Consultancy Services in 2020.

Federal records were documenting this shift a decade before the GCC era. Trade Adjustment Assistance determinations—Labor Department findings that workers were separated because work moved to a foreign country—exist for the Enterprise IT organization of The Hartford (2010, and again 2013), MassMutual's business-and-technology department in Springfield and Enfield (2012), Voya's IT organization in Windsor (2018), and Aetna's IT workers in Middletown (2021, a petition that states plainly: "jobs moving to India"). A 2021 petition covers Travelers' Business Insurance Technology department in Hartford. The program lapsed in July 2022, so no determination can exist after that date—the trail ends by statute, not because the shifts ended.

Each of these is one data point, treated the same way: a primary record, linked from the investigation's offshore section, establishing that a specific unit's work moved abroad at a specific time. None of them, alone, proves anything about any other employer or year.

The question that matters now

This reframes the investigation's central question. It is no longer only "why did employers use a visa program for local jobs?" It is: are companies moving the region's technology work to cheaper labor markets offshore—and what would it take for the region to retain it? The next records we need are cost comparisons between local and offshore technology labor, and an audit of what state incentives actually bought: Connecticut's subsidy deals of the 2010s paid companies that were simultaneously moving technology work abroad, and at least one marquee onshoring pledge—1,000 Infosys jobs in Hartford—was reported at roughly half strength as of 2025.

Corrections and additional records are welcome through the issue tracker.