President Donald Trump’s administration is coming for immigrant workers at Microsoft and other tech firms. Vice President JD Vance on Thursday accused the tech giant of fraud and announced its suspension from a program employers use to sponsor H-1B visa holders for green cards, the Associated Press reported.
Vance, an inveterate promoter of racist conspiracy theories, alleged at a press conference for the Fraud Task Force that Microsoft conspires to place job ads in obscure small-town papers. Then, according to Vance, Americans fail to see the ads, and Microsoft can claim it advertised the job to citizens before abusing H-1B holders as a pool of forced, foreign labor.
“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper,” Vance said. “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.”
H-1B visas are nonimmigrant visas that provide temporary work status in the U.S. for three years with the option for an extension to six. The program is designed to let firms file to sponsor foreign workers with hard-to-find skill sets.
According to Axios and the Seattle Times, the administration is suspending Microsoft and the other firms from a separate program, the Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM). One PERM process allows a current H-1B holder’s employer to sponsor them for a green card, the separate, coveted document that conveys permanent residency anywhere in the country.
An employer must request labor certification through PERM, which means demonstrating why they can’t find a qualified U.S. worker, to begin sponsoring a worker for a green card. But once the card is actually issued, the employer’s involvement is over. Green cards obtained through PERM are the same as any other green card, conveying the same rights and privileges.
So the program actually does the opposite of what Vance says (creating “foreign indentured servants”): It creates legal, permanent U.S. residents, who employers can’t coerce with the threat of expulsion via visa cancellation, and who are generally free to apply to the same jobs at the same salaries that U.S. citizens do.
“Once you have a green card, you’re no longer dependent on your employer for your immigration status — you’re a permanent resident who can change jobs and negotiate higher wages without fear,” Biden-era USCIS advisor Doug Rand told the AP.
Anyhow, small-town newspapers are mostly going out of business, and Microsoft’s actual job site is right here.
Other companies subject to the decision include Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, and other IT firms, according to Reuters. Vance, for his part, seemed particularly interested in singling out Microsoft.
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft,” Vance continued. He also stated Microsoft laid off 6,000 workers last year (his undercount, actually) and obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards for workers. Vance added, “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data shows that Microsoft is the fifth-highest user of H-1B visas, the Associated Press noted, while the most prolific is Amazon. Microsoft does lead on PERM applications. Software development in general accounted for 22.7% of over 130,000 PERM applications certified by the Labor Department last year, with the next-closest sector, and many of the other top categories are tech-related.
A previous report by Newsweek found that H-1B holders on global HR firm Deel’s platform earned a median income of $140,000, compared to $130,000 for U.S. citizens in similar roles, which would suggest that companies are using H-1B visas to chase down rare talent—a pattern that held up for similar programs in the UK and United Arab Emirates. However, Newsweek noted previous research using separate data found H-1B holders made around 16% less than Americans in similar roles, equaling nearly $100,000 in savings for employers over a six-year term.
Ron Hira, a political science professor at Howard University, told the Seattle Times that the move is significant because rules requiring that employers demonstrate they could not find Americans to fill a job have “never been enforced.”
A Microsoft spokesperson directed Gizmodo to a blog post stating company representatives “look forward to providing the Administration with additional information.” Of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications Microsoft submitted during the last fiscal year, the statement read, “80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.”
“The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country,” Microsoft added in the post. The company wrote that it pays H-1B employees the same rates as anyone else doing comparable work.
Vance’s announcement came hours before Trump personally presented Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a former H-1B visa holder, with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Also honored: Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has said he used to have an H-1B visa, as well as Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su, all of whom are immigrants.
Nadella, who has long been on the list of U.S. tech magnates happy to publicly lick Trump’s boots, posted a big thank you to the president for “this incredible honor today.”
Thank you, @POTUS, for this incredible honor today. I'm humbled to stand alongside so many giants of American innovation and looking forward for what we can continue to do together to advance technology and drive American prosperity. https://t.co/RpoeJU61yp
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) October 8, 2026
Well, no surprises there.
Per Reuters, Vance also announced during the speech that the government is investigating nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, on the separate basis of their handling of student exchange-visitor visas.
