White House suspends Microsoft and seven other firms from green card visa program

Vice President JD Vance announced the suspension of Microsoft from the permanent labor certification program at a Thursday press conference, accusing the company of replacing American workers with what he called foreign indentured servants.

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling confirmed the government will not process any new or pending PERM applications from Microsoft or seven other companies: Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. Sonderling said companies like Microsoft, as well as US universities, have turned into visa mills that were flooding the US with foreign workers. The PERM program is a pathway for workers to become permanent US residents, often leading to a green card that allows them to remain and work in the country indefinitely.

Vance’s case against Microsoft

Vance said Microsoft had laid off about 6,000 workers and filed 6,800 H-1B visa applications over the same period, calling it evidence that the company was replacing American workers and undercutting their wages. “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” he said. Vance claimed that workers hired through the H-1B program make $20,000 less on average than US workers in the same position, and he accused Microsoft and the other firms of committing fraud through the visa program. “No company in the US has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said. He explained his indentured servants reference by noting that if H-1B workers are fired or laid off, they have to leave the US. Typically, such a worker has a 60-day grace period in that circumstance. Last month, the US government proposed eliminating that grace period altogether.

Microsoft’s response

Microsoft said 80% of the H-1B filings it submitted over the last fiscal year were for extensions or status changes for existing employees, not new hires. The company said its H-1B employees are paid the same as any other employees doing comparable work. According to Ellis, a company that aids tech firms with hiring skilled workers from abroad, the median salary for an H-1B worker at Microsoft is $155,000. Microsoft employs more than 200,000 people worldwide. A Microsoft spokeswoman said, “We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information.”

A medal and a suspension on the same day

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, was at the White House on Thursday to receive a medal for technology innovation from President Donald Trump. Trump said the White House was honoured to be awarding the medal and that it was so well-deserved. Other recipients included Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Sergey Brin, and Michael Dell. Nadella and most of the other medal recipients were also present at recent White House events, including a lunch on artificial intelligence and a state dinner for China’s President Xi Jinping.

Broader landscape

The H-1B visa program, aimed at highly skilled or specialized workers, has been used by major US tech firms for decades and is capped at 85,000 visas per year. Sonderling said that since 2009, Microsoft and Adobe had received about 230,000 H-1B approvals and 100,000 permanent labor certifications. During the last fiscal year, the Department of Labor certified more than 130,000 PERM applications across 10 business categories, according to BBC News. Amazon topped the list of H-1B employers with more than 9,300 petitions this year, while Microsoft applied for H-1B visas for nearly 3,700 workers in 2026, making it the fifth largest employer on the visa, according to the Guardian. According to BBC News, every major US tech firm hires through the H-1B program, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, and Nvidia, though none of those were named by Vance. The National Immigration Forum wrote in a September 2026 blogpost that policies making the US less attractive to highly skilled workers could strengthen global competitors.