The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata and Wipro from the Program Electronic Review Management system, the labor certification program that lets employers convert skilled foreign workers to permanent residents, accusing the companies of fraud and abuse. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. Vice President JD Vance said at Thursday’s news conference: “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”
Sonderling said the change followed criminal investigations. “Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost three million foreign workers,” he said. “They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers.” Vance added: “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”
Microsoft pushed back in a strongly worded blog post, saying it only files H-1B petitions for workers meeting the visa category’s rigorous standards and pays them the same as comparable employees. The company said it filed about 6,000 H-1B applications in the last fiscal year, 80 percent of them to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than hire new people, with new-employee filings equal to about 1 percent of its US workforce. Its CEO Satya Nadella once held an H-1B visa, and the company has fired more than 20,000 staff since early 2025.
India’s industry body NASSCOM shrugged off the changes, arguing immigration and skilled talent mobility “are two distinct issues and should not be viewed through the same lens,” and that Indian firms have steadily reduced H-1B dependence while expanding local US hiring. Indian minister of state Vardhan Singh has said skilled talent mobility plays a significant role in innovation and growth in both countries. The move lands in a busy week on the immigration front: Vance also said the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, over alleged abuse of a program for international students, and STAT reported a proposed $70,000 fee for the popular international student work program.