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.

Employer Beneficiaries Approved Layoffs
AMAZON COM SERVICES LLC 19,327
INFOSYS LIMITED 17,489 800
GOOGLE LLC 15,010 12,000
MICROSOFT CORPORATION 14,707 9,000 / 15,000
META PLATFORMS INC 13,338 3,000
AMAZON.COM SERVICES LLC 12,629
APPLE INC 11,896 600
... ... ...
IBM CORPORATION 6,989 thousands
AMAZON WEB SERVICES 6,667 hundreds
INTEL CORPORATION 6,322 5,000 / 24,500
ORACLE AMERICA INC 6,292 10,000
ACCENTURE LLP 5,862 11,000