White House suspends Microsoft from green card program over H-1B fraud

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – The Trump administration is cutting one of America’s biggest tech companies out of a major green card program over alleged visa fraud.

Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that Microsoft is being suspended from a Department of Labor program employers use to sponsor H-1B visa holders for green cards, the Associated Press reported Thursday. This effort is part of a wider visa crackdown, in which the administration seeks to root out fraud and prioritize American jobs.

“Last year, Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H1B visas,” Vance said during a Thursday press conference announcing the suspension. “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

“For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign, indentured servants,” Vance added.

The H-1B program, which has been in existence since 1990, lets employers in the U.S. hire foreign nationals for “specialty occupations” on a temporary basis.

American tech workers have long argued that companies use visa programs to replace them with cheap foreign labor.

Jonathan, a cybersecurity professional who has since given up on the industry, got zero offers after applying for more than 200 tech jobs and being laid off in November 2024, he told the Daily Caller News Foundation in December 2025.

John, who worked in IT at a Connecticut insurance company, said at the time that roughly 350 American IT staffers there were gradually phased out for foreign workers over his decade working with the firm.

“Most of the time they had them train their Indian replacements before they left as a condition of receiving their severance,” he told the DCNF in Dec. 2025.

Joseph Ibrahim, an unemployed Florida tech worker, told the DCNF he was promised in high school that learning to code would be a good job.

“Well, it turns out they outsource the coding jobs also, not just the manufacturing jobs,” Ibrahim said.

To sponsor most foreign workers for a green card, a company must first prove to the Labor Department that bringing them on won’t cost American jobs or drive down their income, a process known as permanent labor certification, or PERM, according to the Department of Labor.

The green card freeze extends beyond Microsoft to Adobe and six IT firms: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said during the Thursday press conference.

The White House referred the DCNF to the Vice President’s press office when asked for comment. Vance’s press office did not immediately respond.

Microsoft referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to a Thursday press release disputing Vance’s portrayal of its hiring.

“[O]f the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees,” Microsoft said in a Thursday press release. “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.”

Microsoft said in a July 6 employee memo that it was eliminating around 4,800 roles, about 2.1 percent of its global workforce.

Trump awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit on Thursday for “exemplary achievement and leadership in science and technology,” according to the White House.

(Photo credit: Unsplash, ‪Salah Darwish, cropped)