NEW YORK, Sept 24 (AFP): On a bright September morning, employees stream through the turnstiles and vast lobby of Goldman Sachs' headquarters in the sunlit Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan.
More than 9,000 people work at the investment bank's New York head office.
And hundreds of them depend on the H-1B skilled worker visa, recently targeted by the Trump administration for a dramatic overhaul.
A September 19 order by President Donald Trump mandates $100,000 payments from companies for every new hire through the program.
Though the major impact will be on the tech sector-the largest source of H-1B hiring-financial companies like Goldman Sachs will also be forced to re-evaluate their practice of hiring from abroad.
In the first two quarters of 2025, Goldman Sachs was the biggest recipient of H-1B visas in New York City. The Big Apple was, in turn, the single location with the most H-1B recipients in all of the United States.
Aggregated at the state level, California and Texas both attract more H-1B visa holders than the state of New York; but there is no one city or town in either of these states that boasts a higher number of H-1B holders than the east coast metropolis.
This concentration of H-1B visas in New York is driven by hiring at Wall Street's financial giants.
Data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services analyzed by AFP shows that four of the top five H-1B visa recipients in New York City are financial services companies: the investment banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup, and financial data company Bloomberg.
The other company in the top five is the consulting and professional services firm McKinsey.
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