When Li* decided to leave a plum job at TikTok for an engineering role at a startup, he knew he was taking a risk. Beyond giving up the stability of working on a product that was soaring in popularity, the move would also restart the clock on his green card application. But the new job promised an attractive leadership opportunity, and the tech industry was booming at the time.
This month, however, Li (*who requested a pseudonym to protect his identity), lost his job when his employer conducted a second round of layoffs in less than a year. He had started interviewing for other jobs after last year’s cuts, but by that point many companies were planning to freeze hiring. After Li received two verbal offers, both companies pulled the plug on the process. “It was a little bit too late,” he says. “Because those companies were also realizing the economy was not looking good.”
The pressure for Li to find a new job is especially high: Like many other H-1B workers, he needs to be sponsored by a company to retain his visa status—and ensure his family won’t be uprooted after more than a decade in the U.S. (Getting laid off has also set back Li’s timeline for receiving a green card by about two years.) Without a new job or change in visa status, Li won’t be able to stay in the country much longer. “My last option is going back to school, which is not ideal,” he says. “If it comes down to it, pursuing a PhD degree is something I can do, but it really doesn’t help my family in terms of financial support.”
As layoffs have swept the tech industry over the past year, more than 260,000 workers have reportedly lost their jobs. Since tech companies have long relied on foreign talent, a significant portion of those laid-off workers are people like Li, whose employment is directly tied to their ability to continue living in the U.S.
For years, the tech industry has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the H-1B visa program, which has enabled companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers—largely hailing from India and China—in specialized fields like computer science. Nearly 70% of approved H-1B petitions in fiscal year 2021 were for “computer-related occupations,” according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and a recent Bloomberg analysis of USCIS data found that Amazon, Lyft, Meta, Salesforce, Stripe, and Twitter alone had sponsored more than 45,000 H-1B workers over the past three years.
There is no clear accounting of how many laid-off employees were on work visas, but estimates indicate that tens of thousands of people may have been impacted across the tech industry. When an H-1B holder loses their job, they have a grace period of only a few weeks—60 days, to be exact—to transfer their visa to a new employer or apply for a different visa. Due to per-country caps on employment-based green cards, some people on H-1B visas have been in the U.S. for years or even decades waiting to formally become permanent residents.
“It’s so stressful and heartbreaking when people go through this situation,” says Sophie Alcorn, founder and CEO of Alcorn Immigration Law. “Because of our broken immigration system and the green card backlogs, the tech workers who are primarily affected are from India and China. Many have already been in the United States for 5, 10, 15, 20 years—paying full tuition as international students [and] getting bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees and maybe PhDs. So at the time when these layoff notices can happen, people have already dedicated huge swaths of time, of their lives; many are married or have U.S. citizen children. Our immigration system forces people to live on the edge, where you never know what’s at the end of another 60 days and if you’ll have to leave everything.”
Alcorn has teamed up with Ellis, a startup that provides immigration and financial support to international students, to assist laid-off workers who are trying to buy time and protect their visa status while they find a new job or figure out the best course of action. Alcorn is encouraging people in this situation to file for a change of status by applying for a temporary visa like the B1 or B2, which allows visa holders to remain in the U.S. for up to 180 days.
“If you’re on an H-1B, the best thing would be to get a new job that can do an H-1B transfer for you where the new company will file it within the 60 days,” Alcorn says. “But it’s very, very difficult for people to get laid off, regroup, apply for jobs, get first interviews, get second interviews, negotiate offers, and accept an offer where the company agrees to do the transfer. And then it’ll easily take the company three to four weeks to get all the paperwork together.”
Amid layoffs, many companies have pulled back on hiring, and major tech firms like Google have also put the brakes on permanent labor certification program, or PERM, applications—the first step to sponsoring green cards for eligible employees—which means those H-1B visa holders will remain in limbo.
Many laid-off workers simply don’t know what options are available to them or how they can personally take action, which is where organizations like Ellis hope to come in and help educate them. Depending on their status, “the way we could help here was putting a landing page up [and] a step-by-step guide,” says Ellis founder and CEO Sampei Omichi. “People don’t know that they don’t actually need a lawyer; they can do this themselves.”
To support workers who are in more complex visa situations, Alcorn will be offering free consultations for the next month. (Alongside legal partner ImmiPartner, the immigration software platform Bridge is providing a similar service, pledging $250,000 toward assisting companies that want to hire laid-off H-1B workers.)
Some tech workers—including those who are still employed—are also transitioning to the O-1 visa, which is a popular option for entrepreneurs and founders. While it isn’t an immediate fix, the O-1 visa can offer more security since it isn’t tied to employment at a specific company.
“The fact is, those cases typically take three months to get ready because they’re easily 600 to 800 pages of evidence to prove somebody merits that status,” Alcorn says. “Trying to do the whole thing from start to finish in 60 days is really pushing it. But we are seeing a lot of people who still have their jobs who are ready to get started on one of those pathways as a backup option.”
Other workers are going back to school or considering moves to Canada, while those who have access to capital could qualify for the EB-5 investor visa program.
Depending on their situation, family immigration may also be an option—an area that the startup Boundless specializes in. Boundless offers an “Ask my attorney” service, a low-cost way for people who don’t have their own attorneys to get advice. “People have appreciated [this] because they often don’t get clear answers from their company attorneys because those attorneys technically represent the company,” says Boundless cofounder and CEO Xiao Wang. “I’ve seen an uptick in people who just want a second opinion.”
Navigating the immigration system as a laid-off worker is also a departure from how employment visa programs like the H-1B typically work, in which companies petition the government on one’s behalf. And while tech companies are vocal advocates for work visa programs and immigration reform, the majority have offered little to no support to laid-off employees on work visas—despite the fact that a significant portion of the U.S. immigration system hinges on “companies petitioning and sponsoring workers,” Alcorn says. “You would imagine that [these] workers would have protections between jobs, but the way our system is set up, if there’s no employer that currently wants you, [then] you’re kind of out of luck. Companies could do more, but it’s really hard—and they’re not necessarily incentivized to do so.”
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