H-1B Visa Is the Nation's Top Search as IBM Consulting Ends Sponsorship and a Comment Deadline Lands Friday
IBM Consulting will stop sponsoring H-1B visas and green cards for most of its U.S. roles, its spokesperson confirmed to Reuters. Separately, public comments on a federal rule that would make H-1B extensions harder close Friday, November 13.
AUSTIN — The search term sitting at the top of the nation's trending list early Thursday is not a game or a celebrity. It is 'h-1b visa' — No. 1 on the U.S. Google Trends listing updated overnight — and for a tech-employment city like Austin, the two developments driving it are both about who gets to keep working in the United States, and on what paperwork.
The first is IBM. IBM Consulting, the company's largest division, with more than 150,000 people worldwide, is ending H-1B visa and green card sponsorship for the majority of its U.S. roles, People Matters reported from Reuters' confirmation. An IBM spokesperson told Reuters the consulting business had used the high-skilled visa programmes to address skill shortages, but that its reliance on them had declined over several years as skill availability and client needs evolved. The decision, confirmed November 10, is specific to the consulting division — it is not a company-wide withdrawal of sponsorship. An internal document reviewed by Bloomberg, reported by CoinPaper, gives affected employees two options: continue working for IBM outside the United States, or leave the company by the end of 2026. IBM's own footprint in the programme has been shrinking for years: 1,611 H-1B petition approvals in fiscal 2026, down from 2,045 in 2025 and nearly 3,000 in 2024.
The second driver is a deadline. On Friday, November 13, the public comment window closes on a Department of Homeland Security proposal — published in the Federal Register on October 14 under Docket No. USCIS-2026-0529 — that would remove the regulation requiring USCIS officers to generally defer to a prior approval when the same worker seeks an extension on the same facts. Extensions are the bulk of the programme: USCIS approved about 258,000 continuing-employment petitions in fiscal 2024, and about 79 percent of them — roughly 203,000 — went to Indian-born workers, the group the change would fall on most heavily. Comments are accepted only through regulations.gov, and the current rule stays in force unless and until a final rule replaces it.
None of this has stopped the programme's ordinary traffic. In the first nine months of fiscal 2026, USCIS approved 270,419 H-1B petitions and denied 8,231 — an approval rate of about 97 percent, with another 156,404 petitions pending. What is changing is the ground under renewals and under the employers who sponsor them, and in a city whose economy runs on exactly those employers and exactly those workers, Thursday's top search is a local story wearing a national label.
