Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from a key green card program, accusing Microsoft of replacing laid-off American workers with foreign employees. The move halts new permanent labor certification applications as federal officials investigate alleged fraud in employment-based immigration programs.
White House Suspends Microsoft and Adobe from Permanent Labor Certification Program
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the restrictions alongside Vice President JD Vance during a news conference held inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus. The Trump administration’s suspension targets the Permanent Labor Certification Program, known as PERM, which serves as the initial gateway for employers seeking to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. Alongside Microsoft and Adobe, the Labor Department halted new application processing for a series of major information technology firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro, and HCL, citing multiple active federal investigations.
Vance singled out Microsoft during the announcement, accusing the tech giant of systemic abuse. There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft,
Vance said. The administration contends that the software giant used obscure recruitment practices, such as placing job advertisements in small-town newspapers where local applicants were unlikely to respond, to manufacture a shortage of domestic labor.
Laying Off American Workers While Securing Visas and Green Cards
Vance asserted that the company laid off 6,000 American workers last year while simultaneously securing 6,300 H-1B temporary visas and nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards, pointing to Microsoft’s recent staffing and immigration figures to justify the suspension.
If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data places Microsoft fifth among corporate H-1B users, with Amazon ranking first. Vance argued that H-1B visa holders operate as foreign indentured servants because their legal ability to remain in the United States is tied directly to their employment, leaving them vulnerable to lower compensation relative to domestic peers.
Microsoft Defends Its Hiring Record and Workforce Compensation
The company clarified that roughly 80% of its approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications submitted during the previous fiscal year were renewals or status changes for individuals already employed by the firm, emphasizing in a public statement that the vast majority of its U.S. workforce consists of American citizens.
These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country.
Microsoft filed 21,706 petitions for 2026, with a median base salary of $180,710. The company stated that it only files petitions for applicants meeting rigorous visa standards and maintains some of the highest compensation packages across the technology sector.
Economists and Former Officials Question the Administration Strategy
Doug Rand, who served as a senior advisor at USCIS during the Biden administration, characterized the White House announcement as incoherent, noting that green cards actually grant workers permanent residency and the freedom to change jobs without employer sponsorship.
If the Trump administration were truly concerned that H-1B workers are ‘indentured servants,’ then the last thing they would do is block companies from helping their own H-1B workers get green cards,
Rand said, according to reporting from the Associated Press. Once issued a green card, a worker is no longer tied to a specific employer for immigration status. Immigration experts and economists have challenged the logic behind freezing green card sponsorship.
Jobs are created by a firm,
said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at UC Davis, pointing out that hiring skilled individuals allows companies to innovate and expand overall domestic employment rather than fighting over a fixed number of positions.
Concurrent Scrutiny of University Exchange Programs
Alongside the Microsoft and Adobe actions, the administration announced investigations into nine universities regarding their handling of J-1 exchange visitor visas. The institutions named in the probe include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
President Donald Trump separately hosted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other tech executives at the White House on Thursday to present them with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
