The H-1B Multiplier

When a company sponsors an H-1B worker, that worker's spouse enters the US on an H-4 visa. Since 2015, H-4 spouses have been eligible for their own Employment Authorization Document (EAD), which lets them work for any employer in any industry with zero restrictions.

Unlike the H-1B, which is tied to a specific employer and job, the H-4 EAD is an open work permit. The holder doesn't need sponsorship. They don't appear in any employer-filed paperwork. No company reports hiring them. No government database tracks where they work. They are, from a data perspective, invisible workers.

The practical effect: every H-1B visa a company files has the potential to add a second worker to the US labor market. The companies on our tracker filed for over 300,000 H-1B approvals between FY2015 and FY2023. The government can tell you exactly how many H-1B workers Amazon brought in. It cannot tell you how many of their spouses are now working at competing companies, startups, or the company down the street from you.

Here are the H-1B approvals for companies on our layoff tracker. Remember: each one of these approvals potentially brings a spouse who can work anywhere in the US with zero tracking. The "multiplier" column shows the potential additional labor supply impact that no one is counting.

A 2018 national survey of 10,000 H-4 EAD holders revealed a workforce that directly competes with American professionals in the highest-paying sectors of the economy:

Half of H-4 EAD holders work in the same computer and technology roles that are being eliminated across the companies on our tracker. They hold advanced degrees at 4x the national rate. They earn professional-level salaries. And they are invisible in every labor market dataset.

When we report that Amazon cut 30,000 workers while receiving 86,794 H-1B approvals over 9 years, we're only counting half the picture. An unknown portion of those 86,794 H-1B holders brought spouses who are also now working in the American labor market. The government does not count them. No employer reports them. No displacement analysis includes them.

H-4 EAD isn't the only invisible labor supply channel. The Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs let international students work in the US without any visa sponsorship at all.

The ICE SEVP data is limited to Top 200 employer lists published as PDFs. Even that limited data shows the same companies appearing across every program: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Intel. The full employer-level data is not publicly available.

Between H-1B workers, their H-4 EAD spouses, OPT students, STEM OPT extensions, and CPT students, the total foreign labor pipeline flowing into the American professional workforce is conservatively over 500,000 new authorizations per year. The companies on our tracker are the largest users of every single one of these programs.

The H-1B system gets all the attention because the data is public. You can look up exactly how many H-1B workers Amazon, Google, or Microsoft sponsor. That data is on our tracker and in the USCIS Employer Data Hub.

But below the H-1B, there's a much larger system that operates with minimal transparency:

This is what makes the H-4 EAD a uniquely important blind spot. The H-1B at least has employer accountability. Company X filed for Y workers, you can look it up. But the H-4 EAD has zero employer connection. A tech company sponsors an H-1B engineer, and the engineer's spouse gets an unrestricted work permit that could put them in any job, at any company, in any industry. No one files anything. No one tracks anything. No one counts the displacement.

The H-4 EAD is invisible by design. But the Labor Condition Application (LCA) data is public, granular, and damning. Every H-1B petition requires an LCA filing with the Department of Labor, certifying that the employer will pay "prevailing wage" and won't displace American workers.

We have the data. Hundreds of thousands of filings. We can see what every company on our tracker offered to pay vs. what the government says they should pay. If the same companies laying off tens of thousands of American workers are simultaneously filing LCAs offering below-market wages to import replacements, the data will show it.