Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the Permanent Labor Certification Program, the federal program companies use to sponsor foreign workers for employment-based green cards. Vance didn’t mince words about why.
“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said at a press conference. That’s a pretty blunt way to put it, but when you’re accusing a trillion-dollar company of gaming the immigration system, blunt seems appropriate.
The PERM program is supposed to require employers to prove no qualified American workers are available before they can sponsor a foreigner for a green card. The idea is to protect American jobs, not give tech giants a cheaper labor pipeline. According to Vance, Microsoft turned that safeguard into something of a suggestion.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling added that the suspension also covers Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini, several of the largest users of employment-based immigration pathways in the country. So this isn’t a one-company scolding. It’s a broad crackdown on an industry that has leaned heavily on foreign worker programs for years.
The timing is a little awkward for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was sitting just two seats away from Vance at President Trump’s White House “Super Intelligence” AI luncheon a little over a week ago. Nothing says “we’re watching you” quite like announcing a federal suspension days after the fancy tech dinner. You can learn about the Microsoft PERM program suspension and what it means for pending green card cases.
It’s also not clear yet how long the suspension will last or what happens to Microsoft employees who already have permanent-residency cases in the pipeline. That’s no small thing, given that PERM applications were already taking an average of 336 calendar days to process as of August. Slow government process plus a freeze equals a very long wait for a lot of people.
Vance targets American corporations with huge accusation, reminds them that our citizen workers should always come first. pic.twitter.com/9jzB5xAT8y
— Frank (@drastic215x) October 8, 2026
Vance also announced that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they used J-1 exchange visas to undercut American wages. Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito confirmed subpoenas have already been served. Harvard getting subpoenaed is becoming something of a recurring theme in this administration.
Microsoft is one of the biggest H-1B visa employers in the country, so this suspension lands squarely in the middle of a much larger fight over who gets to fill American jobs. The next step is watching whether companies push back legally or quietly start adjusting their hiring practices. Either way, the Trump administration just made clear the era of looking the other way on this stuff is over. Tell us what you think in the comments or share this on social media.
