I've been downvoted here before for "victim blaming", but I'm going to say this anyway because someone has to.
It's your responsibility to be in control of your life. There is no grand order of things that will take care of you. There will always be things working against you. Entropy, competition, environmental hazards, psychopaths, etc, are everpresent.
You need to have the confidence to walk away from situations that aren't in line with what you want, and not just throw up your hands and say - I guess this is my life now.
If you are on H1B and you have a family in the country I think you need to be very careful about how you behave at work, and if your work situation sucks you better start looking for a new H1B sponsor. You can always complain later.
If you've been downvoted before for victim blaming, maybe there's cause for you to think before plowing ahead forward? I don't think anyone is implying that it's not your responsibility to be in control of your life. But I think it is the case that there are such things as power asymmetries, powerful institutions, and well intentioned systems that have been left wide open to abuse (H1B system).
To misattribute the failings of a broken system to a lack of personal responsibility is to fundamentally misunderstand the full entirety of the situation. For your own sake, please try to think through this situation a little bit more carefully. Remember, in America, we once used to have a system of indentured servitude that we looked back on with shame. A very large amount of Americans could find it to be a similar kind of shame if we were to re-implement a modern version of it without knowing that it was happening.
Stories like this can serve to shine a light on it. Truth be told, I don't know what happened in this particular case. However, what cannot be argued is that the incentives are ripe for abuse. It is a false equivalence to say that psychopaths are there just as entropy, competition and environmental hazards. Some of those are arguably beneficial. But I will say, at this juncture point and at this particular point in time, people seem to be increasingly unhappy with tolerating openly psychopathic behavior. Sadly, if this employee had a better handle on how American PR, optics and law operates, there's a good chance he could have dropped a nightmare of a PR bomb and be walking away with a settlement right now...
And if he did that, he'd be doing that opposite of what you're suggesting. He'd be standing up, and fighting, which is a thing you can do in this country. It's why I think you're wrong, in this case.
I've been downvoted here before for "victim blaming", but I'm going to say this anyway because someone has to.
It's your responsibility to be in control of your life. There is no grand order of things that will take care of you. There will always be things working against you. Entropy, competition, environmental hazards, psychopaths, etc, are everpresent.
You need to have the confidence to walk away from situations that aren't in line with what you want, and not just throw up your hands and say - I guess this is my life now.