Trump's immigration crackdown has big tech on edge. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. Registration for the H-1B visa lottery closed last week.

The tech industry has long been the biggest beneficiary of this program for specialized workers.

But there's a lot of uncertainty now.

The Trump administration has been cracking down on legal immigrants.

It's led some companies to advise H-1B holders not to leave the country.

For fear, they could be barred from returning.

Tech reporter Garrett DeVink wrote about this for the Washington Post.

There's a set number of H-1Bs that can be awarded every year.

It's around 65,000. And so people apply through

immigration lawyers. Generally, if you work at a company, the company kind of handles that for you,

and some of them get these visas. So yeah, Amazon is the biggest right now, but companies like

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, meta, they also every single year

apply for and win hundreds or thousands of H-1B visas for their workers.

And then on the list, there are some companies that are not exactly household names,

but are sort of contracting companies that also feed into the tech

industry, right?

Yeah, I mean, this is another really important part of the H-1B system.

And the most controversial part, I would say, there's these large IT consulting companies.

So these are companies that, you know, if businesses don't want to have their own

IT staff, they might contract it out to these companies. And they also apply for a lot of H-1B

visas for their workers. These companies are not always based in Silicon Valley or sort of in the

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