Eight employers lose the green-card route

The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and six other technology and IT services companies from the programme that lets employers apply for green cards for foreign workers, accusing them of fraud. Vice President JD Vance announced the move at a White House news conference on Thursday, TechCrunch and the Associated Press reported. The other firms are Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata and Wipro, so eight companies in all.

The mechanism is the Permanent Labor Certification Program, known as PERM. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending PERM applications involving the companies, according to TechCrunch. The BBC explained that H-1B visas, which are capped at 85,000 a year, are a precursor to the PERM process for anyone seeking permanent US residence. Tech companies are among the largest users of H-1B visas, and nearly three-quarters of approved visas go to workers from India, according to the Associated Press, as cited by TechCrunch.

Vance's argument was aimed hardest at Microsoft. Under PERM, he said, companies must advertise jobs in America before telling the Labor Department they need a foreign worker. "They'll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper," he said, according to the AP account on NBC News. "They'll go out there and say that 'We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.' And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants."

He gave figures. Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards, per the AP. The BBC's account has him citing about 6,000 layoffs and 6,800 H-1B visa applications over the same period. The two reports differ on whether the larger figure was visas obtained or applications filed. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft," Vance said in the AP's account. His message to the company, as TechCrunch quoted him: "You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers."

Microsoft disputed the picture. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans." Of about 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80 per cent were to extend or change the status of existing employees, the company said. The remaining filings for new employees were for people already legally in the United States, and they equal about 1 per cent of its US workforce. Microsoft said it looked forward to giving the administration more information. TechCrunch said Adobe did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the BBC said it had contacted all the companies.

The announcement went wider than PERM. Vance also said the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, over allegations that they abuse a programme that brings international students to the US and use it to undercut American wages, TechCrunch reported. The AP said it came one day after the administration launched another attack on international students' ability to work in the US. Sonderling accused companies like Microsoft, and US universities, of having become "visa mills" that were "flooding" the US with foreign workers, according to the BBC.

The AP noted that the announcement came hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to award the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, at an event honouring some of his tech allies.

What the suspension means in practice has not been spelled out in the reports we read, including how long it lasts and what the companies must do to be reinstated. The test of the fraud allegation, for now, is Microsoft's offer to supply more information. For employers that fill technical roles, the immediate effect is on the permanent-residence path for staff already on H-1B visas. It lands in a labour market that Komposite has described as one where the AI talent market cools from frenzy to merely hot, and where companies are redefining what management means as automation takes over coordination work.