A shareholder of top companies with bases in the US – Amazon, Walmart and Alphabet – is reportedly pushing for these firms to publish numbers revealing the impact of US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown on them.
The union-aligned investment group in question is SOC Investment Group (formerly known Change to Win Federation (CtW) Investment Group), according to Reuters. It owns less than 1% of each of these companies.
According to the firm, the group and its affiliated funds own about 17 million shares of Walmart, 31 million shares of Amazon and 41 million shares Google’s parent company Alphabet, the US news outlet reported.
Trump admin vs H-1B
This comes as US employers and countless others are on edge over the Trump administration’s visa crackdown, which has even severely targeted those in the country with legal status. Amazon, Walmart and Alphabet are famously known for being among big companies that employ top recipients of H-1B visa petition approvals.
Having long sponsored the ‘specialty occupations’ nonimmigrant visa program, they highly rely on highly skilled foreign professionals to expand their workforce. As a result, they have been severely hit by Trump’s repeatedly revised immigration policies that seek to curb the number of incoming foreign nationals into the US.
Possibly, one of the biggest steps officially imposed to make this happen came in through the September proclamation that introduced the massive $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitions.
Top companies’ shareholder asks for financial impact of H-1B overhaul
According to the documents seen by Reuters, SOC Investment Group is keen to know how Amazon, Walmart and Alphabet’s finances and supply chains have been impacted in the wake of the current situation in the US.
On top of that, the shareholder is asking these companies how they will deal with the given development impacting new applications, especially since they house some of the top recipients of the nonimmigrant visa program.
In similar moves executed in the past, the group has triumphantly gotten companies to conduct racial-equity audits and thereafter disclose the results at hand, as per Reuters.
“The availability of labor that’s skilled in the area … is really critical to the long term performance of a company,” SOC Investment Group Executive Director Tejal Patel told the outlet. “If they’re not able to keep up with consumer demand or competition because they’re not able to hire the right people, it poses a threat to the company’s value over the long term.”
As detailed in the report, the letters SOC sent to these companies highlighted that it was positively looking forward to a “productive engagement” with them over the advisory. As per Patel’s statement to Reuters, the firm was “considering all options, which includes litigation.”
However, Trump recently signed an executive order related to such proxy advisors, which could make it easier for the three companies to reject SOC’s proposal. Just days ago, the White House targeted top firms that often “advance and prioritise radical politically-motivated agendas.”
According to the executive order posted on the White House website, Trump has asked the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies to look at top proxy advisors Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, and if they had violated rules related to their treatment of environmental and social issues. Moreover, Trump directed authorities, including Federal Trade Commission and the Labor Department, to weigh in on potentially new regulations.
Through this order, the admin basically took aim at companies that offer institutional investors with advice on how to vote in corporate elections.
How many H-1B workers are hired by the three companies
In September, Newsweek reviewed H-1B data, reporting that several big companies in the US had increased their use of the nonimmigrant visa classification this year. As per the report, Amazon stood at the top of the table as the largest H-1B sponsor, ramping up its visa approvals from 9,257 in 2024 to 10,044 in 2025.
Although the rise may instantly grab one’s attention, the number still remained quite modest when compared with the tech giant’s global headcount of about 1.56 million employees.
Walmart, on the other hand, halted job offers for H-1B visa holders after Trump introduced the massive $100,000 fee, as per an October report by CNN. According to government data cited in the report, the private-sector employer hired more than 2,000 H-1B visa holders at the time.
Alongside Amazon, Google joined the list of the Top 4 companies with the most approved new H-1B petitions in FY 2025, as per the National Foundation for American Policy’s analysis of government data. This particular review showed that Amazon approved 4,644 H-1B petition for initial employment in FY 2025, while Google stood at No 4 with 1,050 approvals. Walmart was a bit lower on the list, but was still reported to have approved 478 such petition in FY 2025. (https://nfap.com/research/new-nfap-policy-brief-h-1b-petitions-and-denial-rates-in-fy-2025/)