Vance Cuts Microsoft, Adobe, and Outsourcing Firms Off the Green-Card Track

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday the administration is suspending Microsoft from the Permanent Labor Certification program, the Labor Department step most employers must clear before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card. He said no company had abused the system more.

“Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers,” Vance said at a White House news conference on H-1B and J-1 fraud. “At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the department will not accept new applications or process pending ones from the named firms. Besides Microsoft, he listed Adobe and the outsourcing companies Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. He said Microsoft and Adobe were suspended because of multiple active federal investigations. Of the outsourcing group, he said that since 2009 the firms had requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals, and obtained more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications.

PERM requires an employer to show that no qualified, available U.S. worker can fill the job. Business Insider, reviewing filings, reported that Microsoft filed 1,504 certified PERM applications in the first three quarters of this fiscal year, more than any other employer, plus 174 for LinkedIn and Activision. Adobe filed 168 in the same period.

Microsoft answered the same day. A statement provided by company representative Kaitlin Haskins said the vast majority of Microsoft’s U.S. employees are Americans and that the company looks forward to giving the administration more information. Of about 6,000 H-1B applications in the last fiscal year, the company said 80 percent were extensions or status changes for people already on the payroll, not new hires. The rest, it said, were people already legally in the United States who chose to join Microsoft, equal to about 1 percent of the U.S. workforce. Microsoft said it files only for applicants who meet the visa standard, pays H-1B workers the same as comparable employees, and pays among the highest wages in H-1B filings.

Vance said the point was to change behavior, not to damage the company. “Our message to Microsoft is, you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” he said. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who stood with Vance, Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito, and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, said criminal cases remain possible if companies or individuals are found to have broken the law.

The same briefing opened a separate front on campuses. D’Esposito said he was announcing an investigation of alleged J-1 visa fraud at nine universities and that subpoenas had been served. The schools named by the department were Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT. “Nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building,” he said. The department’s claim is that schools have used the exchange-visitor category to avoid ordinary employment rules.

Vance asked Congress to rewrite the H-1B statute and said the administration would use the tools it already has if lawmakers do not. The announcement came hours before President Trump awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella at a White House science event, and a little more than a week after Nadella sat near Vance at a White House gathering on artificial intelligence.

The suspensions do not, on the facts released Thursday, cancel existing visas. They stop the named employers from using PERM to move H-1B workers onto the green-card track until the department lifts the bar.