The Trump administration announced a Microsoft green card suspension Thursday, cutting the tech giant off from the program it uses to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency in the United States.
Vice President JD Vance made the announcement at a White House Fraud Task Force press conference inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He was joined by Stephen Miller, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson. Along with Microsoft, the Labor Department suspended Adobe and six of the largest IT outsourcing companies in the world: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
Vance singled out Microsoft. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft,” he said. He claimed the company laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 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.
Here is how the system works. An H-1B is a temporary work visa that lets American companies hire foreign professionals for specialized jobs, and it is especially common in tech. Many of those workers want to stay in the country permanently, so their employer sponsors them for a green card, which grants permanent residency. The first step in that process is called PERM, a labor certification run by the Labor Department. To get it, a company has to show it tested the job market, could not find a qualified American worker for the position, and will pay the going wage for the role. A suspended company cannot move its workers through that step.
The administration claims companies have been using this pathway to bring in cheaper labor, undercut American wages and replace American employees. Vance said the administration still wants tech companies to grow in the United States. “We want you to continue to grow and to employ a lot of people, but we want you to employ American workers,” he said. “And so, our message to Microsoft is you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”
Sonderling announced the outsourcing suspensions himself. “I am hereby suspending from the Permanent Labor Certification Program some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini, and also, due to multiple active federal investigations, @USDOL is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the program,” he said. Outsourcing firms supply tech workers to other companies on contract, and several of the firms named are based in India. Wall Street reacted quickly, with Infosys shares falling about 2.2 percent and Cognizant dipping about 0.7 percent.
Thursday’s announcement builds on a crackdown that started last month. On September 8, D’Esposito posted on X that Cognizant’s PERM filings had been suspended, and Cloudera was soon added. He said his office was working with the White House Fraud Task Force on the investigation and warned that “handcuffs await.”
The government has not released the specific allegations against Microsoft or Adobe, and it has not said how long the suspensions will last. It is also unclear what happens to applications already in progress. In the Cognizant case, the suspension froze new filings but reportedly did not cancel approvals the company had already received. Microsoft and Adobe had not publicly responded as of publication, leaving employees who were counting on the Microsoft green card process waiting to see where their cases stand.
