The Trump administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they have abused immigration programmes at the expense of American citizens. Vice President JD Vance stated there has been no company in the US that has abused the system more than Microsoft, calling the H-1B visa programme "rife with fraud" and saying over-reliance on such schemes "is a fundamental insult to the American worker and to the American way of life."
Six other IT outsourcing companies — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini — were also suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) programme. The administration announced a fraud investigation into the use of J-1 student visas at nine American universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT. Vance claimed Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards, replacing each laid-off worker with "one and a half foreign indentured servants."
Microsoft responded that the "vast majority" of its US employees are Americans and said it looks forward to providing the Administration with additional information. The company added that it only files H-1B petitions for those who meet rigorous standards and pays some of the highest compensation in the tech sector. The announcement is part of a broader crackdown on immigration, following previous attempts to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applications, which was blocked by a federal court. More than 400,000 H-1B visas were approved last year.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing