Posted on 04/03/2026 3:33:13 PM PDT by escapefromboston
H-1B visa filings at major tech companies fell sharply late last year, according to federal data, as layoffs mount and new visa restrictions take hold.
The decline comes as changes to the work visa program since September have made the process costlier and placed applicants under tighter scrutiny, and as tech goliaths like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have undergone successive rounds of job cuts.
Department of Labor data shows that some employers filed markedly fewer H-1B visa applications in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 than they did a year earlier. On the federal calendar, Q1 runs from October through December.
Amazon had the highest number of certified applications and saw a steep decline, dropping from 4,647 in Q1 2025 to 3,057 in Q1 2026. Certified H-1B and similar visa applications are those that the Labor Department has reviewed to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker will be paid similarly to other workers in similar roles, and won't adversely affect employment for those workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The entire H1B program should be abolished.
The job market is so catastrophically bad that I haven’t had screening calls for 98% of the security jobs I’ve applied for and I have years of experience.
Yes, ship all of their families and anchor babies home with them.
And having to leave the U.S. within 2 months.
Maybe unemployed/underemployed U.S. citizen software engineers should consent to being deported </sarcasm>.
If you download this data listing H-1B employers for 2026, you will see that the numbers are down :
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub
Here is another source of data in an article about body shops gaming the USCIS with multiple applications by Bloomberg. It is from 2024 :
archive.is/VHPxZ
Scroll to the bottom for a link to the data. They obtained the data from a FOIA lawsuit. They describe how they analyzed the data.
Here is an article from 2021 that presents graphs on how the OPT-STEM Optional Practical Training visas how flattened wages :
Every report and article I see says the rejection rates for H1bs are way up and that there are significantly fewer of them. I'm willing to have an H1b program for superstars and for areas where we really do have critical shortages but otherwise we should always have a fee that ensures foreign workers are more expensive to hire than American workers. We need to greatly reduce other work visas too such as OPT visas.
I was going to get into the Bloomberg data. The problem is no matter what data I come up with:
1) I don’t think it is trustworthy
2) Nobody is counting how many people actually go back home (none?).
3) If I found that we were bringing in all 1.5 billion Indians into America nobody would care because the news media will not report on it (not even the conservative media).
The news media is the bitch of the left AND big tech.
I didn’t notice if it said they’d be rescinding current Visas of those horrid nasty people.
They should but so far they are letting them run out the 3 to 6 year term on their visas.
We have shortages because of the invasion of brown skins.
Six years to replace without disruption?
Probably wouldn’t take 6 years.
“so far they are letting them run out the 3 to 6 year term on their visas.”
Under Trump, I expect they’re keeping a close eye on those dates. If a RAT wins in 2028, who knows what’ll happen?
6 years till all of them are gone . Every year 1/6th of the visas would expire (and that’s assuming they all renewed after 3 years)
Six years is a long time in the tech world. Many companies and jobs won’t exist.
I work in tech, tons of my co workers and neighbors are here on visas but that anecdotal
https://x.com/LayoffAI/status/2039936897800351794?s=20
I know a lot of middle aged American men with incredible skillsets and ability to work with and manage others who have applied for thousands of jobs with zero response
At this point I consider myself extremely fortunate to work for great people and have a skillset that will probably be in demand for at least a few more years
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