IBM ends most US visa and green card sponsorship in its biggest division

A quiet memo, and a deadline at the end of the year

IBM has told managers in its largest division that it will stop sponsoring United States visas and green cards for most roles, a decision that lands directly on the foreign professionals who staff its consulting business. The announcement, reported first by Bloomberg and confirmed by an IBM spokesperson to Reuters on Tuesday 10 November, covers IBM Consulting, a division of more than 150,000 people serving clients in more than 175 countries.

The choice given to the workers caught by the change is stark: move to an IBM job outside the United States, or leave the company by the end of the year. That is what the internal document shared with managers this week says, according to Bloomberg. IBM framed the move as its own decision. “IBM Consulting participates in US high-skilled visa programmes to address skill shortages,” a spokesperson said on Tuesday. “That participation has been declining for a number of years and as skill availability and client need have evolved, we have opted to discontinue visa and green card sponsorship for the majority of such roles in IBM Consulting.”

What IBM said, and what the document showed

The facts that can be pinned down start with the division itself. IBM Consulting is the company's biggest business by headcount, with more than 150,000 workers, and it has long relied on American high-skilled visa programmes to fill specialist posts quickly. That reliance has been shrinking for years, and the latest count shows how far it has fallen: only 1,611 H-1B petitions were approved for IBM in fiscal year 2026, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data cited by Al Jazeera. For a company of IBM's size, that is a small intake.

The second set of facts concerns the timing, and here the context is impossible to ignore. The Trump administration has spent the past year tightening the channels through which technology companies bring in foreign professionals. In 2025 it announced a one-time $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, a measure federal courts have since blocked. In October 2026 it suspended eight major employers, Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, from the Permanent Labor Certification process, known as PERM, the step for sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card. The administration cited fraud and the replacement of American workers, and Vice President J. D. Vance announced the suspensions. IBM was not suspended, but it now moves in the same direction, voluntarily, a month later.

The market noticed, though it did not panic: IBM's shares dipped about 1% on Tuesday morning. The company continues to sponsor visas in its other divisions, according to the Bloomberg reporting. The debate over chip exports to China showed the same pattern of pressure on the sector.

The numbers IBM has not given

What no reporting has yet settled is the most basic question of all: how many people are affected. IBM has not said how many IBM Consulting workers hold sponsored visas or pending green-card applications, and the 1,611 approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2026 is a flow, not a stock; it counts new approvals in one year, not the sponsored workers already inside the division. Without that figure, nobody outside the company can say whether the decision touches dozens of people or thousands.

Two further questions are unanswered. The first is timing: the company has given no exact effective date, only the year-end horizon, so it is unclear when new sponsorship stops and when existing cases freeze. The second is exceptions: the statement speaks of “the majority of such roles,” which implies that some roles keep sponsorship, but IBM has not said which ones, or on what criteria. The fate of pending cases is also unclear; workers whose green-card applications are already part-way through the PERM process, which can take years. Until IBM explains those points, the announcement reads as a direction of travel rather than a complete policy.

The biggest consulting employer steps back from the visa queue

This matters because IBM Consulting is not a marginal user of the American skilled-visa system. It is one of the largest consulting employers in the country, and its decision changes the arithmetic of the whole market. When a business of 150,000 people stops sponsoring visas for most roles, the signal reaches other employers, who now have cover to do the same, and the foreign professionals who staff the industry, who now have one fewer large door into the American labour market. The H-1B programme is capped at 65,000 new visas a year, and nearly three-quarters of approved visas go to workers from India, according to Associated Press reporting, so the effect will fall hardest on Indian engineers and consultants, already hit by the October PERM suspensions.

It matters, too, because of what it says about the balance of power between Washington and the technology industry. The administration has argued for a year that the visa system is abused, displaces American workers and suppresses their wages, and it has backed that argument with a fee, with suspensions, and with the threat of more. IBM's answer is not a fight but a retreat. The visa waiver agreed between Morocco and Ecuador shows the opposite motion elsewhere in the world, with governments opening doors even as Washington narrows them.

A business decision wearing a policy costume

Look closely at IBM's own explanation and a tension appears. The company says its participation in high-skilled visa programmes has been declining for years, and the numbers support that: 1,611 approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2026 is a small intake for a company of this size. On that reading, the announcement is a tidying-up, the formal end of a practice that had already withered, and the political context is coincidence rather than cause. But timing is also evidence, and the timing points the other way. A company does not send a memo to managers, with a year-end deadline attached, in the same month that Washington suspends eight of its peers from the green-card process, without the one shaping the other. Together the fee and the suspensions have raised the cost and the risk of sponsoring foreign workers to a point where a large employer calculates that the practice is no longer worth defending. IBM's statement is carefully worded to keep both readings alive; it cites skill availability and client needs, not politics.

Where the consultants go next

The second-order effects of this decision will show up far from IBM's headquarters. The most immediate is the redistribution of people: workers who take the transfer option will swell IBM's offices outside the United States, most plausibly in India, and that shift will accelerate a trend in which the work moves to where the workers are. Those who leave will carry their skills to rival employers, to smaller firms that still sponsor, or out of the American market altogether. The wider effect is on the market for sponsorship itself: if IBM's retreat is followed by others, the H-1B system will increasingly serve a narrower set of employers, and that would change the character of the system without any law being passed. The reshaping of China's universities by artificial intelligence shows the same contest for skilled people playing out on the other side of the Pacific, with governments investing in talent at home as the American door narrows.

The cases, the courts and the copycats to watch

Four things will decide what this announcement becomes. The first is IBM's own follow-through: whether the company publishes the numbers, the exceptions and the handling of pending cases. The second is the courts, where the $100,000 H-1B fee is already blocked and the PERM suspensions will almost certainly be challenged. The third is the copycat question: whether other large consulting and outsourcing firms, several of which are already suspended from PERM, now announce similar retreats, or whether IBM stands alone. And the fourth is the workers themselves, whose choices in the coming weeks will show how much room the system still leaves for the people it was built to attract. The German military's ban on Chinese-made drones is a reminder that governments across the West are tightening technology rules in parallel.