Naming Them and Shaming Them
In FY2025 the U.S. issued 859,476 worker visas while the economy created just 584,000 net new jobs — 1.47 worker visas for every job created, about 6.6x the normal 2011-2019 rate and higher than any point during the 2008 financial-crisis recovery.
Read the plain-language breakdown, or see the full 39-year data and methodology.
The State Department still hasn’t published its FY2025 nonimmigrant visa class-of-admission table, nearly eleven months after the fiscal year closed. Its monthly issuance reports kept publishing on schedule though, so we pulled and parsed all twelve ourselves and reconstructed the FY2025 numbers — H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and 74 other classes — now loaded into our visa data browser alongside every year back to 1987.
https://guestworkervisas.com/state_dept_fy2025_niv_reconstruction.php
Every active federal contract in FY2026 whose own description says “staff augmentation” or a close synonym, grouped by the company supplying the labor, cross-referenced against H-1B disclosure data to see whether the same companies also sponsor guest workers.
A deep dive on four H-1B-heavy staffing vendors from our staff-augmentation report finds the same HHSC position numbers — and in two cases the same worker’s surname — recurring across separate fiscal-year contracts, each one re-labeled ‘Competitive.’ Along the way, correcting a subject-line filter that missed every ITSAC-labeled contract nearly doubles what we previously reported these four vendors were paid: from $32.1M to $62.8M.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_itsac_position_recycling.php
Told there’s no law stopping a Texas state contractor from staffing its work almost entirely with H-1B workers instead of Americans? We went through the actual statutes — IRCA’s citizenship-discrimination ban, the H-1B non-displacement attestation, the 2017 Buy American Hire American executive order, and Texas’s own contractor rules — to see what each really requires, who enforces it, and where each one’s reach stops.
https://guestworkervisas.com/h1b_displacement_legal_landscape.php
Six months after Gov. Abbott froze new H-1B filings at Texas state agencies and public universities unless the Texas Workforce Commission grants written permission, zero institutions had requested that permission as of July 17 — while DOL data shows 326 new-hire H-1B filings certified anyway. Reporters who asked TWC to explain were pointed at the state’s public records law instead of getting an answer.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_h1b_freeze_zero_enforcement.php
Following up on the TWC 2026 vendor list published this week, we ran the same H-1B cross-reference against Staff Augmentation contracts at every Texas state agency going back to 2013 — 5,853 contracts worth $1.346 billion, with the Health and Human Services Commission alone accounting for 44% of it. Of the 60 largest vendors, 29 are certified H-1B sponsors, several of them H-1B dependent staffing shops where 80-100% of their own LCA filings are for H-1B workers.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_staff_augmentation_h1b_sponsors.php
The full 5,853-contract dataset is also browsable and exportable by agency, vendor, and status:
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_staff_augmentation_contracts.php
Gov. Abbott ordered Texas state agencies and public universities to stop filing new H-1B petitions starting January 27, 2026. DOL disclosure data shows a real one-month compliance dip, then a return to pre-freeze filing volume by April.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_public_universities_h1b_freeze.php
Texas Workforce Commission awarded .95M across 126 contracts in 2026. Cross-referencing that vendor list against this site’s own FY2026 H-1B LCA data turns up two IT vendors — including one hired for explicit Staff Augmentation — that are simultaneously certified H-1B sponsors elsewhere in their business.
https://guestworkervisas.com/twc_2026_contracts_h1b_sponsors.php
DOL’s own regulations limit review of a Labor Condition Application to checking for missing paperwork and “obvious inaccuracies” — not whether the employer’s attestation is actually true (20 CFR §655.740(a)(1)). GAO told Congress as much in 2011: the review is “cursory and limited by law,” and a DHS study found 21% of examined H-1B petitions involved fraud or technical violations. Eleven years of DOL’s own LCA and PERM disclosure data show what that produces — a 0.90% denial rate on 7.9 million H-1B filings since 2015, versus 4.72% for PERM, the sibling program that actually requires documented recruitment. This is a follow-up to our FLAG contract-history report: not who built the system that processes these applications, but what the law actually requires it to enforce.