Please allow me to offer some color from the other side of the table. My colleagues and I are/were/have been hiring managers for the past decade or so. Our recent observations regarding the job market:
1. Incumbent programmers became more productive thanks to GPTs. A shop stopped hiring for junior, mid-career positions.
2. Other shops (small and medium) take it further and layoff 10% of the labor, mostly junior guys, to be replaced with GPTs.
3. Another shop (recognizable name in HN) made some offers to strong candidates, and they took the offers without negotiation. Quite unusual in the light of the past decade.
4. The ones that I wanted to hire or got hired at other shops: the going total comp was 500k - 1.5m USD/annum at senior or staff level. And this range applied to outside the bay area as well.
Talking to some headhunters -- we do see a strong hiring market at the senior level or niche markets (e.g. low latency numerical systems), but the junior levels are definitely seeing a transition. My (very obvious now) running hypothesis is that GPT is influencing the market.
I personally haven't observed any systematic or overt racism implied by OP; I do not recall race explicitly coming up in any of the discussions, but yes there is a large pool of foreign-born engineers who are willing to take a lower pay (who are just as productive, especially with GPT), so perhaps this is what the OP's circle is observing.
On a related note, I read an early research showing the impact of GPT on customer service staff productivity. GPT greatly improved the new/bottom performers but did not impact senior/top performers; a result that fits my intuition of how GPT works. I believe that a similar thing is happening at an industrial scale in tech.
I make no moral judgement here. At least on my end, the market is simply acting in line with supply and demand. Nevertheless, my sympathies for those in an unsuccessful quest.