Companies are Lying About AI Layoffs

Companies are saying that the economy and AI are causing the large amount of tech layoffs, but Vanessa Wingårdh looked at the H-1B visa data and noticed that the companies are lying.

She argues that the American employees are being replaced by cheaper H-1B visa workers. WSJ also reported on this due to some senators speaking up. As proof she uses the H-1B data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. When filtering by fiscal years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the number of Beneficiaries Approved for some of the big corporations as of 30 June 2025 are shown in the second column below. I also searched a bit for news articles about layoffs and put those numbers in the third column.

A commenter on Hacker News writes: "You can go on Blind, Fishbowl, any work related subreddit, etc. and hear the same story over and over and over - 'My company replaced half my department with H1Bs or simply moved it to an offshore center in India, and then on the next earnings call announced that they had replaced all those jobs with AI'. There's a reason why 'AI = Actually Indians' is a meme everywhere on the internet, and it isn't racism, it's just people observing the reality around them."

I searched a bit to verify these claims and it seems plausible since I could without much effort find a report from Boeing in the 2000s, and that indeed the replacing of US workers by H-1Bs seems commonly agreed upon here, here, and here.

Another commenter pointed out that Accenture proposed hiring 12,000 employees in a new campus in India.