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- President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a new $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas.
- Big Tech, consulting, and finance companies are some of the largest employers of H-1B visa workers.
- Two US senators sent letters to 10 companies, asking about foreign hiring practices.
Two US senators have questions for Big Tech and other top companies over their use of H-1B visas amid the Trump administration’s push to slow down foreign worker hiring practices.
In letters sent to 10 companies on Wednesday, including Amazon, Apple, Deloitte, and JPMorgan Chase, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin said they were concerned about the use of H-1B visa workers while the tech sector experiences a “high unemployment rate.”
The senators cited the layoffs the companies conducted in recent years and the number of H-1B visas they applied for in 2025.
In the letter addressed to Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, the senators wrote that Amazon had laid off “tens of thousands of employees in recent years” while it was approved to hire “at least 10,033 H-1B employees” in the latest fiscal year.
“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that Amazon cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions,” the letter said.
Each letter contains eight questions regarding the company’s foreign hiring practices, including whether a company has “displaced any American employees with H-1B employees.”
The letters were sent to Amazon, Apple, Cognizant, Deloitte, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Meta, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services, and Walmart.
Spokespeople for these companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The probe comes just days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that implements a $100,000 fee for each new H-1B application.
The initial unveiling of the H-1B overhaul sent companies scrambling to notify their foreign employees to get back to the US in under 24 hours. The White House later clarified that it was for new visas.
Some business leaders, including Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hailed the move as a necessary corrective to the existing process, while others said it could hurt smaller companies that can’t afford $100,000 application fees.
A JPMorgan Chase report published Tuesday said that the new fee could reduce the US work authorizations by 5,500 per month.
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