The U.S. administration says it is suspending the Permanent Labor Certification program, or PERM for a range of big tech companies, most notably Microsoft, reports Associated Press. The PERM program allows U.S. companies to apply for green cards for foreign workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas.
Vice President J.D. Vance on October 8 accused Microsoft of abusing the system, which requires companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labor, in order to show that no American workers can do the job.
According to The Seattle Times, Adobe and tech consulting firms Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata and Wipro were also suspended from the PERM program. The vice president didn’t mention other Big Tech players that also use the H-1B program heavily, such as Meta, Apple and Google.
The suspensions highlight the Trump administration’s continuing attempts to eliminate almost all forms of immigration, legal or otherwise.
“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. 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,” Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
Microsoft pushed back immediately in a statement that “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.”
“We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people. 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,” the statement said.
Vance and other top administration officials also slammed universities over their use of J-1 visas for international students and information technology outsourcing firms.
