Rivian is facing criticism for reportedly hiring foreign workers while receiving state incentives from Illinois, with allegations of “mass labor recruitment.”
Local media outlet The Center Square reported on Wednesday, citing the platform MyVisaJobs, that Rivian filed over 2,000 H-1B visas between 2022 and 2024, and 180 more in the first half of 2025.
The HB-1 program allows employers to hire nonimmigrant workers in specialty occupations.
It differs from the green card, a Permanent Resident Card, for which the company filed 83 labor petitions year to date, joining the 400 it had filed in the past two years.
According to Simon Hankinson, a Heritage Foundation researcher and former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, the H-1B program “was created 30 years ago to bring in a limited number of special workers during shortages.”
“If Rivian said, ‘these 25 engineers are the best in the world, and only they can design this specific part of the truck,’ that would make sense under the H-1B program,” Hankinson stated. “But that’s clearly not what’s happening at this scale.”
The researcher added that “the same goes for Microsoft — filing over 6,000 petitions isn’t about unique talent, it’s mass labor recruitment and replacement.”
According to Hankinson, Microsoft recently laid off more than 2,000 employees in Washington — including over 800 software engineers — while simultaneously filing about 6,000 visa petitions for similar positions.
Late last month, Rivian laid off roughly 140 employees, or about 1% of its workforce, as part of efforts to streamline operations ahead of the launch of its mid-priced R2 SUV, according to a TechCrunch report.
The company warned last year that it was planning a factory shutdown of “more than one month” to prepare for the new model.”
This marks the third workforce reduction at Rivian in the past 18 months. The company had previously slashed about 10% of its workforce in February 2024, followed by another 1% reduction in April.
According to MyVisaJobs, 89 positions are currently open for Rivian‘s Normal plant, including common tech roles like software developers and product managers.
The company’s page on LinkedIn shows more than 600 job vacancies worldwide with 48 of them located in Illinois.
The researcher stated that workers hired through the H-1B program earn salaries below the median wage.
The H-1B and green card applications do not necessarily reflect the actual number of foreign workers hired, as some visa requests may be denied, and workers renewing or transferring locations require new applications to be filed.
Hankinson is calling for companies that receive public funding to disclose the composition of their workforce, and for the end of companies’ practices of paying visa workers below-market wages, while not hiring “truly high-skilled people.”
Approached by The Center Square, neither Rivian nor the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity provided a response.
As of the end of 2024, Rivian employed 14,861 people, down from 16,790 in 2023.
Rivian manufactures all of its vehicles at its plant in Normal, Illinois. The company purchased the facility from Mitsubishi in 2017, after securing $49 million in state tax credits and $4 million in city property tax abatements over five years.
In May 2024, the Illinois government announced a new incentive package under the new Reimagining Energy and Vehicles program (REV Illinois), supporting Rivian’s $1.5 billion investment in the state.
It was estimated to help “create more than 550 full-time jobs within the next five years alone” and to “enable the company to produce its highly anticipated R2 model” at its Normal facility — expanding “the total capacity for the site to 215,000 units per year.”
According to a statement by Rivian earlier this year, the state’s incentives have led the the company to “offset project start-up costs and certain infrastructure improvements.”
Under the program, the State of Illinois has granted Rivian $634 million in tax credits — which are “tied to the creation of good-paying jobs,” the EV maker said.
In May, the company announced it was receiving $16 million more in state incentives to help fund a new supplier park adjacent to its manufacturing plant in Normal, of which the construction is already underway.
It is expected to create at least 93 full-time jobs initially, with officials saying it could lead to “hundreds” of additional positions once the suppliers move in.
Production figures were at 5,979 units in the same period, down 37.8% from the 9,612 EVs manufactured a year ago.
In the first quarter, Rivian had produced 14,611 vehicles. The company noted that “production was limited during the second quarter in preparation for model year 2026 vehicles expected to launch later this month.”
The Irvine-based automaker’s manufacturing plant in Illinois is being expanded to accommodate the production of the upcoming R2 SUV.
