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Oracle is facing sharp criticism and scrutiny for issuing thousands of H-1B petitions for foreign workers after laying off a significant share of its workforce.
According to The New York Post, Oracle filed 3,126 H-1B petitions in the fiscal years 2025 and 2026, even as it laid off thousands of staff members.
Of those more than 3,000 H-1B petitions, 436 were made this year.
On Tuesday this week, Oracle began mass terminations of workers across the globe. Thousands of workers were sent emails telling them their roles had been eliminated as part of a broader organizational change within the company.
Employees took to social media and forum websites to express their outrage.
Breitbart reports, “ On Blind, an anonymous forum for verified employees, one user described the H-1B petitions as a slap in the face of Oracle’s American employees. The same commenter added: ‘If this doesn’t make you angry, maybe you need to read some heartfelt posts on LinkedIn from Oracle employees who are US citizens and have been laid off after working at Oracle for years.’
Other users on the platform expressed similar sentiments. One commenter noted: ‘Look at all big tech companies, they do massive layoffs then rehire at lower salary.’ Another user posted: ‘Transnational corporations are disloyal to American state and the nation.’
Other Big Tech companies have continued to lay off American workers and replace them with foreign workers.
In January, Amazon announced it would get rid of 16,000 corporate positions, having filed 2,675 H-1B petitions in the fiscal years 2025 and 2026. In October of last year, Amazon laid off a further 14,000 positions.
The H-1B visa system has been a target for the Trump administration as part of its wide-ranging immigration and labor reforms.
In December 2024, potential reforms to the scheme led to an acrimonious public row. Ill-advised comments from Vivek Ramaswamy about Americans’ failings in the job market—including a bizarre suggestion that Americans spend too much time idolizing Zach and Slater from Saved by the Bell and have too many sleepovers when they could be studying—led to his removal from DOGE and also caused the first open break between Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
Critics of the H-1B program have argued that it allows companies to suppress wages, especially in the tech sector, and disadvantages American workers.
According to government data, India was by far the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas last year, accounting for 71% of all approved visas, with China accounting for 11.7%.
In the first half of 2025, Amazon.com and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta Platforms were granted over 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each.
In November 2025, it was announced that close to 200 companies were being investigated for abusing the H-1B system.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer said 175 investigations were now taking place into companies using the H-1B system.
The enforcement initiative, called “Project Firewall,” began in September, when President Trump announced the addition of a $100,000 fee for H-1B petitions.
“We have over 175 investigations that we’ve opened, and for the first time in history, as a Secretary of Labor, I have signed those investigations personally, because we want to make sure that these companies are not abusing. We want to make sure that they’re protecting the American worker, first by one: posting the jobs available to Americans.
“Two: if they do need to use the H-1B, Visa Program, within the program, we have to make sure that they’re paying those fair wages, not to depress the American wages. And if that employee leaves that company, they have to make sure that they’re posting that with the government so that we know where those employers have gone and those employees.
“So it’s been somewhat of a problem, but we want to protect the American worker first, and Project Firewall will do that. We will be actively investigating these companies if they’re getting in the way of protecting foreign workers over American ones.”
