Set the two columns side by side and the story tells itself. Google laid off 951 U.S. employees in 2024 and hired 1,058 new H-1B workers the same year. Apple laid off 735 people and brought on 864 new H-1B employees. Microsoft laid off 3,426 workers between 2022 and 2024 while hiring 3,259 new H-1B workers over that identical window. These aren't cherry-picked outliers from obscure filings — they're the same companies simultaneously telling shareholders they're cutting costs and telling immigration authorities they need more specialized foreign labor, in numbers that line up almost one-to-one.
Zoom out and the pattern holds at industry scale. Across the top 30 H-1B employers, companies hired more than 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 while laying off at least 85,000 employees in that same period. Amazon alone recorded more than 13,000 H-1B applications last year, making it the single largest visa user in the country; Meta and Tata Consultancy round out the top five. Nationally, 2025 saw 406,348 approved H-1B visas, with 70% going to Indian nationals — a volume that has grown substantially even as tech employment overall has been flat to shrinking.
The financial logic behind this isn't a mystery, and it isn't really disputed even by people sympathetic to the program: companies save close to $100,000 per worker over six years by hiring an H-1B employee instead of an equivalent American one. That gap doesn't exist because H-1B workers are more qualified — the visa program's own design, tying a worker's legal status to their employer, makes them structurally less able to push back on pay, hours, or working conditions than an American colleague with full mobility in the labor market. A worker who can be deported for quitting the wrong job is not negotiating from the same position as one who can walk across the street to a competitor.
It's worth noting the timing detail buried in the Google numbers: H-1B decisions at the company rose from 2,309 in 2015 to 7,868 in 2025, a more than threefold increase that tracks closely with Sundar Pichai's tenure as CEO. Microsoft shows a similar arc under Satya Nadella, climbing from 2,983 H-1B decisions in 2014 to 6,258 in 2025. Whatever the individual merits of any single hire, a threefold increase in visa reliance across a decade of layoffs at the same firms is not the signature of a narrow, targeted skills gap. It's the signature of a hiring strategy.
Defenders of the program will point out, correctly, that layoffs and H-1B hiring happen in different divisions, for different roles, at different times of year — the numbers aren't literally the same workers being swapped out one for one. But that defense misses the point critics are actually making. Nobody needs a one-to-one swap to prove the incentive is real. A company that can lay off thousands of Americans in a cost-cutting cycle and, in the same stretch, expand its H-1B hiring by a similar order of magnitude has demonstrated, in its own numbers, that headcount reduction and headcount replacement are not in tension with each other. They're two levers on the same budget.
Read the original reporting: How the H-1B visa replaces American workers.