Microsoft files more permanent labor certification applications than any company in the country. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance said it would file no more, at least for now, while the government investigates what he called abuse of the program.
The suspension cuts Microsoft off from the PERM program, the permanent labor certification process that most employment-based green cards require. Under the program, an employer must show that a foreign hire will not hurt American workers’ wages or jobs, and that no qualified American worker is available for the role. Vance said the suspension would last “as long as it needs to.”
PERM sits on top of the H-1B visa, which lets companies hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis. H-1B is the ticket in. PERM is the step that turns a temporary hire into a permanent resident, and it is the step Microsoft can no longer take for the time being.
Microsoft’s position as the largest filer is a matter of public record. According to Labor Department data, the company leads the country in PERM applications, which made it the most visible target when the administration decided to make an example. The suspension also covers firms that build and staff technology operations for corporate clients, several of them based in India, whose business models depend heavily on visa programs.
Vance was direct about his reasoning. “There has been no company in the United States that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” he said at a press conference, accusing the company of benefiting from the PERM and H-1B programs while laying off thousands of American workers. The message, he said, was that Microsoft had to hire American workers.
Microsoft was not alone. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the same suspension for Adobe and for large IT outsourcing firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. Vance also named nine universities, including Harvard and Stanford, accusing them of abusing the J-1 visa program that brings foreign students and scholars to the United States for work and study exchanges. Those schools, he said, face further investigation.
The universities named on Thursday sit on a different axis of the same argument. The J-1 exchange visa lets foreign students and scholars study and work in the United States for a defined period, and the administration says nine schools have stretched its terms. Vance described the conduct as suspected visa fraud and promised further scrutiny, extending the crackdown from employers of skilled labor to the institutions that train it.
Microsoft pushed back within hours. The company said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans, and that roughly 80 percent of the 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees, not to hire new people.
The company added that the remaining filings for new employees covered people already legally in the United States who chose to work for Microsoft, a group it said equals about 1 percent of its U.S. workforce. Microsoft said it files H-1B petitions only for people who meet the rigorous standards of the visa category, and that it pays its H-1B employees the same as anyone doing comparable work.
The practical effect lands on thousands of foreign workers. With the program suspended, Microsoft cannot submit new PERM applications or have pending ones processed, which stalls the path to permanent residency for H-1B employees who are already in the country and already on the payroll.
The move is part of a broader crackdown the administration has framed as protecting American jobs. Vance chairs the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, and the suspensions were announced under that banner. The administration’s stated goal is to make companies change how they hire, and it has said it wants Microsoft and the others to thrive in the United States but not at the cost of American workers.
The politics cut both ways. Critics of the move point out that the country was built on immigration and that skilled foreign workers often bring new technology and new jobs with them. The administration’s answer is that the current system was tilted toward employers and away from American workers, and that the suspension is the correction. Both readings have an audience, and the dispute is less about the numbers than about what the numbers are said to prove.
For Microsoft, the immediate cost is procedural, and manageable: no new PERM filings and a queue of pending applications in limbo. The larger question is whether the administration extends this treatment across the technology industry and what, exactly, a company must do to get its access back. Vance offered no end date and no checklist, which leaves the suspensions open-ended by design.
