JPMorgan Chase

America's Biggest Bank Is Also Its Biggest Banking H-1B Shop

JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States by assets. They are also, by a wide margin, the #1 H-1B sponsor among all financial institutions in the country. And #11 overall nationally, sitting alongside the usual suspects from Big Tech and the Indian outsourcing firms. A bank. Competing with Infosys and TCS for cheap foreign labor.

What JPMorgan is doing with the visa program is one of the most sophisticated workforce arbitrage operations I've ever seen. It's not illegal. It's just shameless.

The Numbers Are Staggering

Between fiscal years 2020 and 2026, JPMorgan filed 23,192 Labor Condition Applications for H-1B workers. Full-year volume runs roughly 2,700 to 4,500 per year, like clockwork. LCA filings are up 32% from 2020 to 2025. This isn't a company scrambling for niche talent. This is a pipeline.

And the approval rate is above 98%. Every year. That's not a review process. That's a rubber stamp.

The Workforce Percentage Needs a Footnote

JPMorgan's FY2025 LCA filings equal 1.92% of its disclosed U.S. workforce. That is the clean comparison point because the company disclosed both total headcount and U.S. headcount for the year.

Some earlier years are less clean. FY2023 only has total headcount in the app data, so its workforce percentage uses a broader denominator and should not be overread as a true year-over-year drop in U.S. H-1B intensity.

Plano, Texas: The Real JPMorgan Tech Hub

JPMorgan's #1 city for H-1B workers is Plano, Texas, with 1,116 workers. New York City comes in second at 847. They're deliberately placing visa workers in a low cost-of-living suburb instead of their actual headquarters.

The pay gap proves it: H-1B workers in these low-COL locations earn $37,000 less per year than their counterparts in high-COL areas. That is the entire point.

"Specialty Occupation", Really?

Nearly 70% of their H-1B positions are commodity IT work. The top job title is "Software Engineering." Not "Quantitative Researcher." Not "Derivatives Structuring Specialist." The most generic title in tech.

There are hundreds of thousands of American software engineers. This is not a labor shortage. This is a wage suppression strategy dressed up in immigration law.

The Permanent Residency Pipeline

JPMorgan has filed 3,208 PERM (green card) applications, turning temporary visa workers into permanent residents. PERM applications doubled to 1,060 in FY2025 alone.

You bring someone in on an H-1B, pay them below market, place them in Plano instead of Manhattan, and then lock them in with a green card process that takes years. It's a loyalty program built on immigration dependency. And it's expanding.

Meanwhile, the American Workforce Shrinks

While JPMorgan ramps up visa sponsorship, their U.S. workforce share has declined from 60% to 58% of total headcount. At JPMorgan's scale, two percentage points represents thousands of jobs.

Jamie Dimon: The $100K Fee Fighter

When Congress proposed a $100,000 fee on H-1B applications, CEO Jamie Dimon personally came out against it. The man who made $36 million last year thinks a $100K visa fee is too expensive.

If H-1B workers were genuinely irreplaceable talent commanding top-of-market salaries, a $100K fee would be a rounding error. The fact that Dimon fought it means the entire value proposition of the program is the cost savings.

The Bottom Line

JPMorgan Chase isn't doing anything technically illegal. They've built a perfectly legal system for importing thousands of workers, placing them in cheap cities, paying them below what they'd earn in New York, locking them in with green card sponsorship, and calling it "talent strategy."

Every "Software Engineer" they hire in Plano at a $37K discount is an American worker who didn't get that job. That's not xenophobia. That's math.