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Since President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has moved to crack down on a large migrant labor force that helps employers in industries like agriculture, service, and healthcare operate.
The administration has put certain green card applications on hold to vet them for issues such as fraud or national security concerns, and revoked visas that had allowed workers from countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to temporarily work and live in the US. It’s also eyeing changes to the H-1B visa program, which grants around 85,000 visas to highly skilled workers from other countries each year, and is tightening interview requirements for certain visa applicants.
Even as the White House seeks to curb legal pathways for migrants to work in the US, employers are more willing to provide immigration-related benefits to their workers than they were five years ago, recent data from Indeed suggests.
A surge in sponsorship support. The share of US job postings on Indeed that advertised visa support, such as sponsorship for green cards or visas, was up 257% from the pre-pandemic baseline (February 2020) as of May.
This precipitous jump started back in mid-2021, and can be explained in part by the incredibly tight labor market that affected employer hiring strategies in the years following the pandemic, said Allison Shrivastava, an economist with the Indeed Hiring Lab.
“People had a really difficult time attracting and holding on to employees. We saw wage increases at almost 10% year over year. It was just an incredibly competitive time for employers to find employees,” she said. As a result, employers became more open to hiring foreign-born talent. This willingness to sponsor visas has lingered in certain sectors, Shrivastava added, even as the labor market has softened.
Healthcare stands out as an industry where employers are still keen to sponsor visas for potential hires. As of May, more than three-quarters of job postings that listed immigration benefits were in this field, according to Indeed.
It’s worth noting that Indeed’s data isn’t necessarily reflective of sectors that rely heavily on immigrant labor, but use more informal methods to hire workers, such as agriculture or construction. Industries that would be more liable to hire unauthorized immigrants likely wouldn’t advertise jobs online, according to Shrivastava. That doesn’t mean these job seekers aren’t interested in finding an employer that will sponsor their visa: Data shows the highest share of job-seekers (13.6%) using visa sponsorship-related terms in their job searches from June 2024 to May 2025 were in the food preparation and service sector, which typically has a large number of undocumented workers.
The landscape for immigration benefits. Over the past few decades, employers have become more reliant on foreign-born workers to fill their talent pools, with the number of nonimmigrant visas (i.e. those granted to immigrants who plan to stay in the US temporarily) issued to workers rising to 1.3 million in FY2023, from just under 160,000 in FY1989, according to State Department data.
Sponsoring a foreign-born employee’s visa can be costly, with an initial H-1B petition costing anywhere from $4,535 to $17,885, according to one recent estimate.
The fact that an increasing share of employers are willing to incur these costs suggests that jobs advertising immigration-related benefits are ones that companies struggle to fill with talent based in their own countries, Shrivastava said.
While this data shows employers are still open to sponsoring visas, policy changes in the US could affect job-seeker interest in these roles, Shrivastava noted. Job searches with visa sponsorship-related keywords have dipped slightly since the beginning of January, when Trump took office on an anti-immigrant agenda.
“We’ll have to see if people are willing to take those jobs,” given immigration policy is changing so rapidly, she said.