From Amazon to Pinterest: The 40 tech companies that file the most H-1B immigrant work visas
President Trump's immigration crackdown is raising questions about visa programs for skilled workers. See which tech companies file the most H-1Bs.
Win McNamee/Pool Photo via AP
- Tech companies seek to hire thousands of skilled foreign workers through H-1B visas each year.
- President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown is raising questions about the future of such visas.
- See which tech companies file for the most H-1B visas, according to publicly available data.
Tech industry giants are hiring thousands of foreign workers through H-1B visas each year, even as the program faces renewed scrutiny under President Donald Trump's second term and growing skepticism from Silicon Valley leaders who once championed it.
The H-1B program allows US companies to hire up to 85,000 foreign workers with specialized skills annually. Workers are chosen through an annual lottery, which kicked off last week and will run through March 24. While Trump expressed support in December, calling it "a great program" that he has "used many times," key figures in his political base have voiced opposition.
Things escalated late last year when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, a first-generation Indian American who immigrated to the US from India in 2007, to serve as a senior White House advisor for AI. The appointment drew backlash from some MAGA supporters, including former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who called the program "a total and complete scam to destroy the American worker."
In late January, Republican Senators John Kennedy and Rick Scott introduced a joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse a Biden-era rule that extended the automatic renewal period for employment authorization documents from 180 days to 540 days. Kennedy said the extension "hampers the Trump administration's efforts to enforce our immigration laws," signaling there would be additional scrutiny of work permits for foreign nationals.
Even tech leaders have softened their stance. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, once unequivocal supporters, have recently acknowledged the need for improvement.
Andreessen said on Lex Fridman's podcast last month that the US has been conducting "a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into."
Musk has called for raising the minimum salary requirements for people on H-1B visas and adding a "yearly cost" to make it more expensive for companies to hire from overseas. "I've been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform," he posted on X.
While the program's future remains uncertain, any significant changes or restrictions to H-1B visas would profoundly impact America's largest technology companies, which have built their workforces around access to global talent.
Business Insider used publicly available data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services to analyze which tech companies filed the most H-1B requests during the 2024 government fiscal year. The data comes from applications submitted by businesses seeking to sponsor skilled workers' visas.
Our analysis shows that tech giants collectively file for thousands of these visas annually, using them to fill critical roles that they claim cannot be adequately staffed domestically.
Notably, not every visa filing results in an actual hire, and occasionally multiple filings might be associated with a single position. Companies sometimes submit new applications to accommodate amendments or extend existing visas. Nevertheless, the data available to the public offers a reliable glimpse into the H-1B visa requirements of major corporations.
We have excluded IT consulting firms from this analysis to focus specifically on tech product companies, despite consulting giants like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services traditionally being among the program's largest users.
The analysis reveals that tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Apple are among the program's heaviest users, with thousands of filings each.
While most positions are for software engineers and other technical roles, companies also use the program to fill specialized positions in research, product management, and data science. The employee head count for each firm comes from the latest publicly available data such as the company's latest annual report, their corporate website, or according to sources BI spoke with.
The firms listed either did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment on the record.
Here are the top 40 tech companies sponsoring H-1B visas, ranked by their number of filings:
Reuters; SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
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David Rubenstein/YouTube
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
Cooper Neill/Getty Images
Ramon Costa/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Intel; Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
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Shawn Thew/Getty Images
Dan Kitwood/Getty
Interim Archives/Getty Images
Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
Thomson Reuters
REUTERS/ Albert Gea
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Justin Sullivan/Getty
World Economic Forum / Sandra Blaser
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
ullstein bild Dtl/ Getty
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
SOPA Images
Brandon Bell
Lucid Motors
REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Fiserv
Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
VMware, Facebook
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Yingna Cai/Shutterstock
Snowflake
Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto
Joe Scarnici/Getty Images
Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Joe Raedle
AFP
