Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and five of the largest Indian-run staffing companies from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, the key government pathway employers use to sponsor foreign workers for green cards — a move that strikes at the heart of the H-1B system that has hollowed out the American white-collar workforce for a generation.
Speaking at a news conference on H-1B and J-1 visa fraud alongside Attorney General Todd Blanche and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, Vance laid out what he called a "scandalous system."
"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft," Vance said.
The numbers, per Vance: Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards for foreign workers.
"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. "Our message to Microsoft is, you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants."
The Associated Press reports the administration is accusing Microsoft of fraud. Microsoft pushed back within hours, saying in a statement that "the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans" and that roughly 80% of the 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees — not to hire new people.
Vance also named nine universities his task force believes warrant investigation over their use of J-1 visas: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT. According to Vance, Americans employed as graduate students and researchers at those schools make roughly $20,000 more than workers brought in on J-1 visas — and the schools are using J-1 workers for federally funded grants at a 61% rate, against a national average of 38%.
"So something weird is going on at these universities," Vance said. "They're using these visas way too much."
The timing turned heads in Washington. Hours after the announcement, President Trump was scheduled to award the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at a White House ceremony, the AP reported — a juxtaposition that underscores just how blunt the administration's public break with Big Tech's labor model has become.
By the administration's own accounting, visa programs keep roughly 2.5 million foreign workers in jobs that would otherwise go to American graduates. Labor Secretary Sonderling said his department would block residency visa awards to foreign workers at Microsoft, Adobe and the Indian staffing firms — which administration officials describe as the central conduits for the displacement of skilled American professionals.
The PERM suspension is not a ban on Microsoft or the other companies doing business in America. It cuts off their access to the government's certification that no qualified American worker was available for a job — the first step toward sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card.
Microsoft said it looked forward to providing the administration additional information. It is not yet known how long the suspensions will remain in place, and the affected staffing firms have not issued public responses.
What is clear is that Vance has now put the visa question at the center of the administration's economic agenda — framing the H-1B and J-1 programs not as a story about immigration in the abstract, but as a direct transfer of wealth and opportunity out of the pockets of American graduates and into the balance sheets of the companies that hired around them.
Our Take
For years, Americans were told the H-1B program filled jobs no one here could do. Thursday, JD Vance put numbers on the racket: 6,000 American workers shown the door at Microsoft, 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards flowing in behind them. That is not a skills gap. That is a conveyor belt — built, greased and blessed by a federal bureaucracy that looked the other way because the check cleared every year.
Patriots have watched this scam for decades while legacy media and the Chamber of Commerce told us to be quiet. Remember the Disney workers in 2015 forced to train their own H-1B replacements before being laid off? Same playbook. The only difference now is there is an administration willing to cut off the head of the snake instead of studying it.
The slickest part of the operation has always been the front end — Indian staffing firms acting as middlemen, selling American jobs to mixed-skill workers abroad and pocketing the spread, while corporations collect public praise for "global talent" and quietly park the savings. The universities, meanwhile, collect federal grant dollars and cheap labor while telling families that an American graduate student costs too much to fund. Sixty-one percent J-1 usage at nine elite campuses against a 38% national average isn't a coincidence — it's a business model.
Vance's message to Microsoft should be carved into the wall of every corporate HR department in America: you can be a great American company or you can replace Americans with indentured servants. You cannot be both.
The tape is out. The numbers are public. Now watch which Republicans and which CEOs line up to defend the scam — and remember their names.
