Based on reports that US tech majors, including Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, added 32,000 employees in India, social media influencers concluded that the H-1B crackdown has actually backfired and instead of creating more jobs for Americans, these jobs actually exited America as big companies offshored these jobs to India. The figure has been reached according to data from Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm. The link between the visa fee and the offshoring of the jobs can be a little stretched as all these big tech majors can easily pay the $100,000 H-1B fee. “As US H-1B visa rules tightened this year with higher fees and wage requirements, Big Tech responded predictably: they hired offshore instead. Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google pushed their combined India workforce to 214,000, the fastest growth in three years. That’s 32,000+ new hires that could have gone to Americans. These aren’t call center jobs. They’re AI, machine learning, cloud engineering, data science, and cybersecurity roles,” entrepreneur and podcast host Mario Nawfal posted. “The irony is brutal: visa curbs designed to prioritize American workers just made it cheaper and easier for corporations to offshore the same jobs remotely. No visa required. No wage floor. No American hired. This is the loophole nobody closed. You can restrict who comes here to work. You can’t restrict who works from there. Until policy addresses corporate offshoring directly, companies will keep doing the math and choosing the cheaper option overseas. American workers keep losing,” Nawfal wrote. Another influencer James Blunt commented that he got to know about this offshoring directly from the executives who confirmed that they moved towards offshoring because of the uncertainty in the administration’s visa rules. “I’m hearing this directly from executives, the uncertainty was the final shove. Offshoring offers certainty + scalability and zero U.S. regulatory risk. If the goal was to keep jobs in America, this did the opposite,” James Blunt wrote.
3 big H-1B changes introduced by Trump administration in 2025
- $100,000 fee for companies to submit a new petition for hiring an H-1B. This fee will be applicable if the prospective employee is not inside the US.
- Social media vetting for H-1B visa applications.
- No random lottery for H-1B. Wage-based selection would give higher priority to higher wages. This is a proposal and may run into legal troubles.
