The Trump administration has suspended Microsoft and several other firms from a program that lets foreign workers apply for green cards, escalating a fight over whether major employers are using immigration rules to bypass American workers.
Vice President JD Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers while obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. 'If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,' Vance said at a White House news conference announcing the decision.
Vance said the suspension affects the PERM program, which companies use through the Department of Labor to hire foreign workers and move them toward permanent residency. He said the companies targeted by the administration can no longer file new or pending PERM applications. The announcement also included other technology firms, and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling included Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini in the suspensions.
Microsoft said it looks forward to 'providing the Administration with additional information.' The company said that of approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were 'to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.' Microsoft said, 'These were not to hire new people.' It added that the remaining filings were for people already legally in the United States, and that they equal only 1% of its U.S. workforce.
The company also said it only files H-1B petitions for 'those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category.'
A former senior adviser at USCIS during the Biden administration, Doug Rand, called Vance's announcement 'incoherent.' Rand said that if the administration were truly worried about H-1B workers being 'indentured servants,' blocking companies from helping those workers get green cards would do the opposite, because green card holders can change jobs and negotiate higher wages.
The move came hours before Trump was scheduled to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It also fit a broader campaign by the administration against universities and employers that welcome foreign students and workers into the country.
The market has already voted on the basic question here: capital goes where rules are clear and hiring is tied to productivity, not paperwork games. If Washington believes a company is using immigration policy to undercut wages or sidestep domestic labor, it will keep tightening the screws.
But the deeper issue is simple. When the government turns visas and green cards into tools of corporate labor planning, the taxpayer does not get a freer market — it gets a managed one. The line between talent recruitment and regulatory arbitrage is where Washington now wants to draw power.
