Full list of companies disqualified from H1-B visa program - Newsweek

As the Trump administration scrutinizes IT company Cognizant's H-1B green card participation over alleged fraud, a handful of other companies are also suspended from accessing new visa holders or seeking permanent residency for existing employees.

The federal government's decision to suspend or debar employers from the H-1B visa program is intended to punish rule breakers and protect foreign workers and U.S. employees, but what happens afterward is difficult to measure.

The Department of Labor maintains a list of employers currently barred from participating in the H-1B program after labor-law violations.

As of September 2026, only a handful of employers were listed as actively debarred, despite the program supporting hundreds of thousands of foreign workers across the United States. Government data makes clear that companies can face significant penalties, including bans on filing new H-1B petitions, civil fines and restrictions on sponsoring workers for permanent residence.

What is far less clear is whether those penalties result in more jobs for American workers.

"PERM application jobs usually are senior-level, require expertise and require some touch point with the end client, such that geographic proximity is a necessary part of the job," Daniel Kotchen, an attorney with Kotchen & Low LLP in Washington, D.C., who has challenged H-1B practices, told Newsweek.

"I’d expect that any visa-dependent company foreclosed from submitting PERM applications would be forced to adjust employment practices and employ more Americans if unable to seek permanent residency for visa employees."

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Labor for comment via email Wednesday afternoon.

The Department of Labor's (DOL) H-1B debarment list is relatively small compared to the thousands of employers that participate in the visa program each year. As of September 1, the department listed five employers that are currently debarred or disqualified from participating in the program.

H-1B visa numbers for the last two organizations on the list were not immediately clear from government data.

Separately, the Labor Department also maintains a list of H-1B "willful violators."

Employers on that list have been found to have committed serious violations of program requirements and face enhanced scrutiny and additional legal obligations. Not every willful violator is necessarily subject to an active debarment, meaning the two lists are related but not identical.

One common misconception is that a company barred from the H-1B program must immediately dismiss all of its foreign workers, but that is not how the system works.

According to DOL guidance, debarment does not invalidate visas already held by employees. Workers can generally continue working under existing authorization, but the employer loses the ability to obtain new H-1B approvals and, in many cases, cannot pursue extensions or green card sponsorship while the debarment remains in effect.

That creates a dilemma for workers whose long-term status depends on their employer.

In practice, some workers may seek to transfer to a new sponsor, while others may face difficult decisions if their work authorization approaches expiration. However, there is no publicly available federal database tracking what ultimately happens to workers employed by debarred companies.

That lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess the real-world effects of one of the government's most severe immigration-employment penalties.

Whether debarment actually increases employment opportunities for U.S. workers is even harder to determine.

"As for any company suspended from the H-1B visa program altogether, the suspension could certainly increase the company’s labor costs," Kotchen said. "For years, within the IT industry, the H-1B visa program has been used as a tool for labor arbitrage and been a primary vehicle to source underpaid and indentured labor from India to displace Americans from jobs."

Federal law contains provisions intended to prevent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B visa holders. Certain employers, including those designated as "willful violators," face restrictions on displacing U.S. workers and must meet additional recruitment requirements.

But some labor experts caution that barring an employer from using H-1B visas does not automatically mean jobs are handed to American workers.

Companies may choose to recruit domestically, but they may also restructure operations, rely on subcontractors, shift work to affiliates, or move functions overseas.

Importantly, the federal government does not publish data showing whether positions previously held by H-1B workers at debarred employers were later filled by U.S. citizens, other visa holders or moved abroad.

The academic evidence on H-1B labor-market effects remains deeply divided.

Some researchers have found evidence suggesting that H-1B hiring can reduce opportunities for other workers in recipient firms.

One widely cited lottery-based study by economists Kirk Doran, Alexander Gelber and Adam Isen concluded that receiving additional H-1B visas was associated with reductions in other employment at participating firms and produced limited measurable innovation gains. Their research has frequently been cited by critics of the program.

"While the specifics of any given hiring process depend on the company, I have found that on average H-1B workers crowd out non-H-1B workers at the companies that hire them," Doran told Newsweek on Wednesday. "When it comes to growth and hiring it’s not an either or: They may grow more slowly as a result of losing H-1B workers and still hire more non-H-1Bs as a result. Research is still evolving in this area, and we still have more to learn about how these averages are changing over time, as well as how H-1Bs affect industries as a whole."

Other scholars have reached different conclusions.

A more recent study using Census Bureau-linked employer data found that access to H-1B workers increased firm growth, hiring and survival, particularly among smaller, highly productive businesses. The researchers reported no net evidence that access to H-1B workers displaced native-born college-educated employees at the firm level overall, although they noted more complex effects among different groups of workers.

Research examining startups has likewise found that firms with greater success obtaining H-1B workers were more likely to attract venture capital, generate patents and achieve successful exits through acquisitions or public offerings.

The conflicting findings illustrate why economists continue to debate the program's overall effect on American workers.

Another major area of dispute centers on wages.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis estimated that H-1B workers at many companies earned significantly less than comparable U.S. workers when factors such as education, occupation, age and location were considered. The study's author, George Borjas of Harvard Kennedy School, argued that wage differences may create financial incentives for some employers to rely heavily on foreign labor.

Supporters of the visa program dispute the idea that lower wages are widespread and argue that many employers use H-1B workers because they cannot easily recruit enough workers with specialized skills.

The DOL requires employers to certify that H-1B employees will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers

"IT corporations have profited handsomely at the expense of both American and Indian employees, and the resulting effects on America’s IT labor market has been catastrophic," Kotchen said. "Addressing corrupt practices in IT should be a bipartisan issue that has for too long been ignored and overlooked, which has done nothing but protect entrenched corporate interests. I’m hopeful that’s now changing."

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Dave Siminoff.