Washington just took its biggest swing yet at Big Tech's favorite immigration pipeline. On Thursday, October 8, the Trump administration barred Microsoft, Adobe, and several of the world's largest IT services firms from the program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for green cards, accusing them of systemic H-1B visa fraud.
The announcement came from Vice President JD Vance, who leads the administration's antifraud task force, at a morning press conference in Washington. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the Department of Labor will not accept new permanent labor certification (PERM) applications from the named companies — or process ones already in the pipeline — while the government investigates alleged H-1B abuses.
PERM certification is the gateway step that lets an employer sponsor an H-1B worker for permanent residency. Without it, companies can still hold workers on temporary visas, but the road to a green card runs through a wall.
Alongside Microsoft and Adobe, the suspension names Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro. Sonderling said the group has requested nearly three million foreign workers since 2009.
Vance alleged that companies deliberately under-advertised job openings to justify hiring foreign workers at lower wages, then used the lack of domestic applicants as cover. His sharpest line was aimed at Redmond: for every worker Microsoft laid off, he claimed, the company replaced that worker "with one and a half foreign indentured servants."
Microsoft pushed back. A spokeswoman said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are American, and that of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications filed in the last fiscal year, about 80 percent were extensions or status changes for existing employees. The rest were hires of people already legally in the United States — about 1 percent of its U.S. workforce. The company says it pays H-1B employees the same as comparable colleagues, with wages among the highest of all H-1B filings.
The move is the latest step in a broader crackdown. A September executive order directed agencies to tighten H-1B program integrity, and a new fee of more than $100,000 per H-1B petition has already drawn a legal challenge from business groups. The H-1B program, created by Congress in 1990, is the main pipeline for highly skilled foreign workers into the U.S. tech industry — nearly three-quarters of approved visas go to workers from India, according to the Associated Press.
What makes this action different is its precision. Rather than reworking visa rules broadly, the administration is freezing specific employers out of the permanent residency pipeline. For the named companies, the practical effect is that a foreign engineer who might have stayed for a career now faces a green card process with no sponsoring employer at the end of it. Expect the courts to weigh in soon — and for every other big tech employer with an H-1B workforce to be reading its own paperwork very carefully this week.