Trump’s Labor Department accused eight technology companies of abusing the employment-based green card system, then froze every new and pending labor certification application involving them. TechCrunch reported that the list covers Microsoft, Adobe, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro.
The companies can contest the suspension. Their employees get uncertainty added to an immigration process that already gives employers far too much control over a worker’s life. JD Vance called those workers “foreign indentured servants” while announcing a policy that makes their route out of employer-sponsored status harder to finish.
The freeze hits before workers gain real portability
PERM is the Labor Department stage used for many employment-based green cards. Under the governing regulation, the employer files the application and asks the government to certify that there are not enough able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers for the job and that hiring the immigrant worker will not depress wages or working conditions.
That certification sits near the front of the process. The employer generally needs it before filing an immigrant petition for the worker. A freeze on new and pending PERM applications therefore blocks workers whose cases have not reached the later protections available to some green card applicants.
Those later protections matter. USCIS allows job portability only after an immigrant petition is approved, or ultimately approved, and an adjustment application has been pending for at least 180 days. The new job also has to be in the same or a similar occupation. A worker stranded at PERM has not reached that protection.
H-1B workers can change employers when another company files the required petition. That still leaves their legal ability to work dependent on finding another sponsor, and it can force them to rebuild an employer-tied green card case. Freezing PERM does not free anyone from employer control. It prolongs the stage when the employer owns the application and the worker carries the risk.
Vance’s arithmetic does not prove replacement
Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers while obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. He then claimed the company had replaced each laid off worker with one and a half immigrant workers, according to the Associated Press report published by NBC News.
That division is politically useful and analytically rotten. Petition counts are not a count of replacement hires. Microsoft told TechCrunch that 80 percent of its roughly 6,000 H-1B filings in the last fiscal year were extensions or changes of status for existing employees. The company said filings for new employees represented about 1 percent of its U.S. workforce and involved people already in the country.
Microsoft has every incentive to present itself in the best light, and its recruitment practices deserve scrutiny. Its response still exposes the flaw in Vance’s equation. An extension for an existing employee cannot be counted as a new worker who replaced somebody laid off. Vance did not establish that his H-1B and green card figures covered different people. He stacked unlike numbers, divided them, and called the result proof.
Then he used the language of exploitation against the workers. By Vance’s account, companies have too much power to import cheaper labor. His administration’s response creates no independent status for affected workers and no way to carry a pending employer-filed PERM application to a new company.
Fraud deserves enforcement that reaches the employer
There is a serious case for pausing suspicious applications. The Labor Department has documented fraud risks in this program for years. Its 2007 integrity rule prohibited the sale of labor certifications, required employers to pay certification costs, created debarment procedures, and preserved enforcement against false filings.
The current suspension also rests on real regulatory authority. 20 CFR 656.31 lets the department suspend applications involving an employer under investigation for possible fraud or willful misrepresentation. The initial suspension may last up to 180 days and can be extended while an investigation or court case continues.
False applications should be denied. Recruitment manipulation should trigger an audit, and proven fraud can bring debarment for up to three years under the same regulation. The government has used a more concrete version of this authority before. In May, the Labor and Justice departments suspended Cloudera’s PERM applications for 180 days after the Justice Department filed a complaint alleging that the company designed a recruitment process that kept qualified U.S. workers from applying.
Nothing in the announced suspension lets workers carry a pending PERM case to another employer while their applications stop moving. A credible enforcement policy would separate the suspected employer’s liability from the sponsored employee’s future. At minimum, workers with frozen applications should be able to preserve their place in the process when they move to a compliant employer.
The workers became props in a fight between powerful people
The contradiction was visible on the day of the announcement. AP reported that Donald Trump was scheduled to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation only hours after Vance accused Microsoft of abusing the green card system.
That is how power protects itself. The chief executive was scheduled to receive a medal while the company entered a legal process. The sponsored worker got another reason to stay with the employer controlling the next filing.
Vance found the right phrase and aimed it at the wrong people. Employer-tied immigration can create conditions that resemble indenture because leaving a job can put legal status and years of paperwork at risk. A government that recognized that abuse would reduce the employer’s leverage. This administration increased it, then blamed the workers caught underneath.