The Billionaires Benefitting from H-1B Visas…

Jeff Skoll, the Canadian engineer who was eBay’s first full-time hire and its first president, thought his future in the U.S. was secure back in the late 1990s. After having spent three years at the helm of the fledgling e-commerce company – creating its business plan, overseeing it as it grew to 3,000 employees before going public in 1998 – he was baffled when his request in 1999 to renew his H-1B visa, which allows skilled foreigners to work legally in the U.S., was rejected.

“The H-1B was essential for me,” Skoll tells Forbes. “Otherwise, I would’ve had to leave the country, and I can’t say if eBay would’ve survived [those] early years.” Financially, Skoll would have been fine, though. A year after eBay’s IPO, he became a billionaire thanks to his stock ownership.

Determined to keep his job at eBay, Skoll turned to then-Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and then-Vice President Al Gore for assistance, thanks to an introduction made by Steve Westly, a well-connected executive and Democratic donor at eBay. With Feinstein’s help, Skoll successfully petitioned for a different kind of visa called an O-1– for immigrants of “extraordinary ability” in business and other fields – before later obtaining his green card and eventually, his U.S. citizenship in 2007. Says Skoll now, “It’s not about avoiding hiring Americans. There just aren’t enough Americans to fill the needs of these companies.”

That’s why so many of America’s best known and most dynamic tech companies are among the top employers for folks on H-1B visas. That includes Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Larry Page’s Google, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. (See table)…