The Trump administration suspended Microsoft, Adobe and several other companies from a key employment-based green-card program on Thursday, a move Vice President JD Vance said was meant to stop firms that use foreign labor to displace American workers. The action targets the Permanent Labor Certification program, or PERM, which lets employers sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency.
Vance said Microsoft was at the center of the decision. He said the company laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards, and added that the administration had decided to suspend Microsoft's access to PERM. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft,” he said, pressing the company to hire American workers instead of, in his words, foreign indentured servants.
Keith Söderling said the Labor Department was also suspending Adobe and several large IT outsourcing firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. He said the department would not accept new applications or process pending ones involving those companies, and said those firms had requested almost 3 million foreign workers since 2009 while receiving over 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications.
The suspension lands in the middle of a broader crackdown on H-1B, J-1 and green-card-related employment pathways, with the administration arguing that some companies have undercut U.S. wages and replaced American employees. That puts Microsoft in the uncomfortable position of being described by officials as a great American company even as it is singled out as a repeat abuser of the system.
The unanswered question now is how long Microsoft and the other named firms will be cut off from PERM. For now, the government has drawn a hard line: no new filings and no pending applications moving forward, a step that could quickly slow a major route to permanent residency for foreign workers tied to some of the country’s biggest technology and outsourcing employers.
