🚨 NOW WE KNOW WHO STOPPED APPLYING FOR H-1Bs WHEN THEY GOT EXPENSIVE.
The employer-by-employer numbers are stunning.
After the $100,000 H-1B fee:
Infosys: 8,886 -> 759 (-91%)
TCS: 5,955 -> 284 (-95%)
HCL: 3,855 -> 387 (-90%)
IBM: 2,855 -> 126 (-96%)
Accenture: 1,324 -> 79 (-94%)
Tech Mahindra: 1,027 -> 43 (-96%)
Wipro: 985 -> 112 (-89%)
And then there’s Cognizant.
Cognizant had 3,752 registrations last year, but no FY2027 figure appears for it in the published table.
That’s notable because 93% of Cognizant’s initial H-1B petitions were consular, meaning the prospective workers were coming from outside the United States.
USCIS itself says companies with consular-heavy pipelines, specifically naming Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL, saw registrations fall by the thousands.
These aren’t small declines.
Several are roughly 90% to 96%.
And many of the biggest drops occurred at companies where the overwhelming majority of initial H-1B petitions involved workers coming from overseas.
Yet the H-1B cap still filled.
So here’s the question I’ve been asking:
If these workers were truly impossible to find in America, why did demand from some of the largest H-1B employers collapse the moment importing them became dramatically more expensive?
https://t.co/Mun9tRhKTA