Employer of record

Hiring a foreigner with no visa

An American company that wants a particular foreign worker has three routes on the rest of this site. Sponsor an H-1B. Hire a graduate on OPT. Wait on a green card. There is a fourth, and it is different in kind.

An employer of record is a company already incorporated in the worker’s country. It signs the employment contract, runs the local payroll and carries the local liability. The American firm directs the work and pays an invoice. The worker never enters the United States. There is no petition, no cap, no lottery and no consulate.

So there is no file. That is the whole point of this page.

The route that files nothing

Every number elsewhere on this site exists because somebody filed a form. Here is what this route does not generate.

No LCA

A Labor Condition Application is an employer promising a wage for work in the United States. No work happens here.

So no wage is promised, and no wage is recorded

No I-129

The petition asks to admit a person. Nobody is asking to admit anyone.

So the worker is in no USCIS count

No SEVIS record

A SEVIS record exists because a school enrolled a student. This route does not pass through a school.

So the hire is in no DHS count

This is not a dataset with a gap in it. It is a route that is unmeasured by construction, and no amount of care with the federal files will ever count it. That bounds everything else here. The visa figures on this site are a floor on how many foreign workers American companies employ. They are never a total.

They make the comparison themselves

These are pages whose own web address contains “h1b”, taken from each vendor’s published sitemap. No paraphrase and no reading between lines: a company chose each of these addresses, and the address is the claim.

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Who references whom

A vendor publishes a page naming a competitor, and the competitor’s name is in the address. That is the edge. Reading it from the URL rather than from the marketing copy means no judgement of mine decides who references whom.

Employer-of-record firms sell employment in countries where the client has no company. US payroll and PEO firms sell a domestic product and appear here only because the employer-of-record vendors compare themselves to them. The rest is identity, spend and ERP software, kept in because leaving it out would make the cluster look tighter than it is.

How many countries each one publishes for

Counted from the country guides in each vendor’s own sitemap, not from the number on the front of the website. A page per country is a claim to operate there, which is a weaker thing than operating there, and it is the one that can be checked.

Method and limits

  • This counts marketing, not employment. A sitemap is a list of claims a company chose to publish. No figure on this page is a count of workers, and none of it should be read as one.
  • One vendor could not be read and is recorded as unavailable, never as zero. A zero would be a claim about that company.
  • A company is a node only if it is declared in the builder’s registry. Every comparison URL that resolves to no declared company is published as a remainder, so the coverage is visible rather than assumed.
  • Translations are not counted twice. The same page published under a dozen locales is one claim, and a page that exists only in translation is counted apart from the rest.
  • Nothing here says any of this is unlawful. Employing someone in their own country through a local employer is ordinary commerce. The point is that it is invisible to the files, not that it is wrong.

Each vendor’s robots.txt was read before anything was fetched; none disallows the sitemap or the paths counted here. Only the URL lists are kept, never page bodies — the addresses are the evidence. Built by scripts/build_eor_market.py into /data/eor_market.json.