Two government agencies each publish a number every year. The State Department counts how many work visas it issues. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts how many net new jobs the economy creates. Almost nobody puts them side by side. When you do, 2025 looks nothing like the fifteen years before it.
In fiscal year 2025, the U.S. government issued 859,476 worker visas — H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, L-1, and similar categories that let someone come to the U.S. specifically to work. That same year, the entire U.S. economy added a net total of 584,000 jobs, according to the BLS's own official jobs count.
For every job the U.S. economy created in 2025, the government issued nearly a job and a half's worth of new work visas. Guest workers weren't filling a small gap alongside a growing job market this year — the visa count actually exceeded the entire net job growth of the country.
From 2011 through 2019, the U.S. typically issued somewhere between 0.15 and 0.35 worker visas for every job created — call it about 1 visa for every 4 to 6 jobs. That's the normal, pre-pandemic pattern: guest workers were a modest slice of a growing pie.
2025's ratio of 1.47 is roughly six and a half times that normal rate. It's even higher than 2010 — the worst year of the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when the economy was still climbing out of a hole of nearly 9 million lost jobs. 2025 has no recession to blame. Job creation just slowed down, and visa issuance didn't.
Every number above comes straight from two federal sources: State Department visa-issuance data and BLS payroll data, year by year back to 1987. The full report shows the sourcing, the caveats, and all 39 years of the ratio — including the recession years excluded from the "normal rate" comparison above.
This investigation is produced independently — one person, 23 years of data work, living on $1,419/month Social Security. If this work matters to you, a small donation makes a real difference.
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