Meta confirmed it will eliminate approximately 10 percent of its workforce, amounting to roughly 8,000 positions, with layoffs beginning May 20. Microsoft simultaneously offered voluntary buyouts to around 7 percent of its US staff. Together, the two announcements put thousands of foreign national workers in legal jeopardy. Under current US immigration rules, a worker whose H-1B visa is sponsored by a specific employer has a strictly limited grace period after termination to find a new sponsoring employer before their legal status in the United States expires.
Meta acknowledged the issue in its internal communications, noting that laid-off employees will receive severance packages that include immigration support services. But immigration advocates say that support, while meaningful, does not address the structural unfairness of a system where job loss for a visa holder is also an expulsion order from the country. A highly skilled data scientist or software engineer who has lived in the United States for years, paid taxes, built a life, and contributed to some of the most important technology companies in the world can be forced to leave because their employer decided to automate their role.
Gaurav Khanna, an economics professor at the University of California San Diego whose research focuses on high-skilled immigration, told NBC News that US immigration policy has amplified the uncertainty for immigrant workers in moments like this. He warned that tech workers globally are watching the situation and recalibrating whether the United States is the best place to build a career. Countries including Canada, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, all of which offer more stable immigration pathways for skilled workers, are actively recruiting talent that the US tech industry pushes out.
The political context matters enormously. The Trump administration has maintained a restrictive posture toward immigration across nearly all categories, including skilled worker visas that had previously enjoyed bipartisan support. The number of H-1B visas approved annually has fluctuated, and processing delays have lengthened, adding additional uncertainty for workers trying to navigate the system. Some tech industry advocates had hoped that Trump’s stated admiration for meritocracy and economic competitiveness would translate into more support for skilled immigration. That hope has largely not been realized.
The irony of the situation is not lost on analysts. The same AI technology that Meta and Microsoft are betting their futures on was built in significant part by immigrant engineers, data scientists, and researchers who came to the United States on exactly the kind of visas now leaving their holders vulnerable. Many of the foundational AI research papers that underpin today’s large language models and machine learning systems were written by international students who subsequently worked in American tech companies on sponsored visas.
The human cost is immeasurable. Families with children in American schools, mortgages on American homes, and deep roots in American communities are now racing against a bureaucratic clock. Some will find new sponsoring employers quickly. Others will not, and they will be forced to uproot lives they have spent years building. In a country that prides itself on attracting and keeping the world’s best minds, the sight of those minds leaving involuntarily is a warning that deserves urgent policy attention.
The broader American technology industry is watching closely. If the US continues to combine aggressive AI automation of skilled jobs with restrictive immigration policies that prevent those same skilled workers from staying, the long-term consequence could be a hollowing out of the international talent that has made Silicon Valley the most productive innovation ecosystem in the world.
