Tables 1 through 5 show the number of petitions that the government has approved for individual employers to sponsor workers for visas or status, the share of workers who fit into those categories who are outside the United States (and subject to the ban), the number of employers who received labor certification or labor condition application approvals from the Department of Labor (DOL) allowing them to petition for workers, and the number of employers who received approved petitions from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The years reflect the most recent data publicly available.
The H-1B category for high skilled workers represents the largest number of employers with 59,427 employers receiving labor condition application approvals and 29,012 employers receiving petition approvals for initial or new workers in 2019 (Table 1). Only 38 percent of their H-1B initial hires were abroad. The H-2B nonagricultural category had about 5,000 employers receive labor certification application approvals in recent years. The most recent year’s data for 2017 show 3,788 employers who received petition approvals (Table 2). Nearly all H-2B workers came from abroad.
The employment-based second and third preference categories saw 924 employers receive labor certification approvals for workers abroad (Table 3), and 776 of them were eligible to petition for their employees to receive immigrant visas to travel here. The L-1 category data are older but show 7,020 employers in 2018 receiving approvals for initial L-1 petitions (Table 4). Almost 100 percent of L‐1s are abroad because the program exists to allow multinationals to transfer foreign employees to U.S. job sites. The J-1 Summer Work and Travel Program is even older—from 2015—but the size of the program has been similar in recent years. In 2015, nearly 16,000 employers hired J‐1s under the Summer Work and Travel Program (Table 5). Nearly all hires appear to have occurred abroad, but no public data on the share is available.
Using the employment data from the most recent years shows about 55,000 unique employers across all these programs. Assuming that the share of hires abroad reflects the share of employers who exclusively hiring workers abroad, a little more than 6 months would normally see a little less than 20,000 distinct employers submit petitions, sponsor, or hire for foreign workers in these categories.
The United States government is harming its own industries, making the country less competitive and attractive for businesses that employ millions of Americans.
The raw data for the J-1 Summer Work and Travel Program is not available, but very few J-1 employers (197 of 15,889) hire under the H-2B program, which covers similar lower-skilled jobs, so it is fair to assume little overlap with other categories.
Source: About 20,000 U.S. Employers Are Affected by Trump’s Travel Bans This Year
