IN-DEPTH: Q&A with SOC as it shifts focus to immigration policy
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SOC Investment Group has filed shareholder proposals at Alphabet, Amazon and Walmart seeking disclosure on the impacts of U.S. immigration policy changes. Below, SOC's corporate governance director Louis Malizia speaks to DMI on what drove the campaign.
SOC has engaged on a wide range of themes over recent years, from labor relations, health and safety to executive compensation. What drove the group to turn its attention to immigration policy ahead of the 2026 season?
There's been rapid and expansive changes to the nation's immigration policy and enforcement. We see this changing the landscape for U.S.-based companies with risks for investors, workers and consumers.
Companies that have extensive reliance on H-1B visa hires and exposure to industries with large immigrant populated workforces such as agriculture, transportation and logistics are vulnerable to these sharp contractions in the labor supply chain and related increasing costs.
We think the residual risks are going to be even more difficult to surmount. Those risks include declines in productivity and threats to innovation, as well as a blow to a company’s reputation.
For workers, the impact is often immediate, with job loss and loss of opportunity as well as severe changes to immigration status, which can lead to detainment and deportation.
All three companies that we filed the resolution at are some of the highest-level employers of H-1B visa applicants, with Amazon being the largest sponsor of H-1B visas in 2025.
At Amazon and Walmart, SOC has focused on the impacts changes in immigration policy could have on agriculture and logistics. What do you feel are the greatest risks?
I think it's important to realize that there is a great risk to workers and consumers because of shrinking labor supply leading to rising prices. This alongside the reliance that some companies like Amazon and Walmart have on fresh produce as profit and sales centers can impact their bottom lines. Walmart says 70% of produce sold in its stores comes domestically, and 60% of its sales comes from the produce aisle.
This same logic applies to Amazon and Walmart when it comes to their trucking and logistics segments – a shrinking labor force due to immigration policy changes can impact operations and raise costs. These are some very real impacts and I don’t think it’s an issue that companies can or should easily omit from their disclosures.
At Google parent company Alphabet, SOC took a different approach and flagged concerns that such policy changes could have a detrimental impact on AI innovation. Can you expand on this?
The AI revolution and these massive immigration changes are happening at the same time. The dramatic increase that occurred when H-1B application fees went from $125 to $100,000 last September had an immediate effect on the tech industry.
Job creation is put at risk by this reduction in visas. Studies show that five to seven jobs are created for domestic workers for every foreign-born temporary worker employed at a U.S. business.
We think innovation is certainly at risk as a disproportionate number of the high-quality patents are products of H-1B visa workers.
This shrinking of the talent pool is even further threatened by changes in student visa policies. More than 50% of the computer scientists with graduate degrees are non-U.S. born students and approximately 70% of all graduate students were born abroad.
Alphabet is largely driven by its investment in its technology. Its CapEx reached upwards of $90 billion in 2025, double that recorded just a year prior. These investments have been highly successful for the company with Gemini 3 and Google's custom AI chip met with praise from consumers and investors alike.
The Google research paper “Attention Is All You Need” is the foundation of the generative AI products that we're seeing out there now and when you look at who wrote it, six of the eight were born outside the U.S.
Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) argued that nothing has epitomized the politicization of shareholder meetings more than shareholder proposals focused on environmental and social issues. As you press for disclosure around immigration policy, how would you respond to this view?
Immigration policy has an effect on the bottom line and on all key stakeholders of a company, workers, investors and consumers.
Sometimes, politics are indeed out of a company’s hands. However, companies are political players too with specific issues they advocate on.
While we’re sympathetic to companies being subject to U.S. policy change, we’re invested for the long term, and we’d like to hope that our companies are thinking of sustainable growth plans that reflect the current crisis and their ideas for getting past these problems while protecting the company from these risks in the future.
What do you ultimately hope to achieve from your campaign?
We've been left as investors with a lot of uncertainty, not just due to the pace and scope of these policy changes, but also the lack of transparency on how companies plan to deal with the transformation that's taking place in both the near and long-term.
We’d like to see far better reporting coming from companies on the impacts the shift in immigration policy and enforcement is having on their operations.
At the moment, this is a line or two in a 10K saying there may be risk to the company due to U.S. policy change, and that can be lumped with any number of other instances of U.S. policy change. But we think some of these impacts are having a very direct impact on labor supply chains.
We would like to see how companies are viewing the risk and the types of mitigation efforts they are putting forward to prepare themselves for these risks. We'd want to see the board level responsibility that’s overseeing these risks and protecting our investments and workers.
There could be a wide range of decisions companies are making but we’re not privy to that right now.
