Vance Cut Microsoft Out of the Green Card Program, Saying It Replaced Laid-Off Americans With Foreign Workers

The US government has stopped processing green card paperwork for Microsoft. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that Microsoft, Adobe, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata and Wipro are suspended from the program employers must go through before sponsoring a foreign worker for permanent residency.

Vance, who runs the administration's fraud task force, made Microsoft the face of the crackdown. He accused the company of fraud and of replacing laid-off Americans with cheaper foreign labor. Microsoft disputes that.

What the suspension blocks

The program is called Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM. It is the first step toward an employment-based green card, and it requires the employer to show that no qualified US worker is available for the job, Business Insider explains.

"We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said, according to the New York Post. He added that these companies alone had requested almost 3 million foreign workers since 2009.

Microsoft uses PERM more than anyone. It filed 1,504 certified applications in the first three quarters of the fiscal year, the most of any employer, plus 174 more for LinkedIn and Activision. Adobe filed 168.

Nobody has said how long the suspension will last or what happens to employees whose cases are already pending. Those cases were not moving fast to begin with: PERM applications took 336 days on average in August.

Vance's math

Vance claimed Microsoft laid off 6,000 Americans last year while receiving 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In his telling, that meant "for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."

He tied the fraud accusation to the certifications employers sign saying a foreign hire has a specialized skill set. "That's clearly not the case if you're just replacing one American worker with a foreign indentured servant and undercutting their wages in the process," he said, Semafor reports. He also called the system "rife with fraud."

"Our message to Microsoft is: you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," Vance said.

Microsoft's numbers

Microsoft tells a different story. The company says the vast majority of its US employees are Americans, and that of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year, 80% extended or changed status for people who already worked there, TechCrunch reports.

The rest, it says, were people already legally in the US, equal to about 1% of its American workforce. "They are not new arrivals to our country," Microsoft said. It added that it pays H-1B staff the same as others doing comparable work and looks forward "to providing the Administration with additional information." Adobe, Cognizant and Infosys did not comment.

A medal on the same day

The timing was awkward. Trump was scheduled to give Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a medal later that same Thursday, at the White House ceremony where Trump also honored Jensen Huang and Elon Musk. About a week earlier, Nadella had sat two seats from Vance at a White House luncheon on AI.

The PERM move fits a wider squeeze on skilled immigration. The administration has already moved to charge more than $100,000 for a single H-1B visa, and the same press conference announced subpoenas into nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT, over J-1 exchange visas.

The stakes for the tech industry are large. Foreign workers made up almost a quarter of the US STEM workforce in 2023, according to the American Immigration Council. For now, green card hopefuls at eight major employers are waiting on a process that has simply stopped.

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