of people have been laid off at Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and other once-voracious tech employers in recent months. But one group of workers has been particularly shortchanged: US immigrants holding H-1B visas for workers with specialist skills.
That’s a particularly tough situation when the larger companies that sponsor most tech-related visas are also those making layoffs and freezing hiring. Amazon and Meta, which together have announced at least 29,000 layoffs in recent months, each applied to sponsor more than 1,000 new H-1B visas in the 2022 fiscal year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services figures show.
“Because our system has been so backlogged, these visa holders have built lives here for years, they have a home, and children, and personal and professional networks that extend for years,” says Linda Moore, president and CEO of TechNet, an industry lobbying group that includes nearly all of the major tech companies. “They’ve just been stuck in this system that gives them no clarity or certainty.