US Bars Microsoft, Adobe, and Major IT Firms From Green Card Program (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0186069738
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/10/08/194218/us-bars-microsoft-adobe-and-major-it-firms-from-green-card-program
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/us-bars-microsoft-adobe-and-major-it-firms-from-green-card-program-for-skilled-foreign-workers/
> The Trump administration is [1]suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, [2]Reuters reported.
>
> The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press.
>
> Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers.
"We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why 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% percent 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."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/us-bars-microsoft-adobe-and-major-it-firms-from-green-card-program-for-skilled-foreign-workers/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/us-suspending-permanent-residency-program-for-microsoft-vance-says-2026-10-08/
Satya must worship the royal anus (Score:5, Insightful)
Tim Apple was smart enough to gift a gold plated whatever.
Sam Altman is a grifter himself and knew how to play this.
And now that we know communism is actually defined as anti-bigotry and has nothing to do with the means of production, I guess it is not communist to take ownership in Intel.
But Satya won't pucker up for Piggie. And so Microsoft gets to be the face of an attempt to gin up anti-Indian bigotry before the midterms.
Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It's just for show (Score:3)
Large companies hire these guys through contractors not directly. So this will have absolutely no impact on your ability to get a job in IT.
The only way to stop the abuse is to completely shut down all of the programs. Americans cannot and will not do nuance. If we were capable of nuance as a people Donald j Trump wouldn't be president.
I'm open to other suggestions but I have yet to hear a single one that is both viable and actually works. And in a country with 25% functional unemployment you can't keep flooding the job market with cheap labor. People are going to look for a solutions and when the left and the center don't have any then the fascists are going to step up. They aren't actually going to solve the problem but they will end democracy by promising to solve it.
Except they don't + H1Bs make local jobs valuable (Score:1)
> Large companies hire these guys through contractors not directly. So this will have absolutely no impact on your ability to get a job in IT. The only way to stop the abuse is to completely shut down all of the programs. Americans cannot and will not do nuance. If we were capable of nuance as a people Donald j Trump wouldn't be president. I'm open to other suggestions but I have yet to hear a single one that is both viable and actually works. And in a country with 25% functional unemployment you can't keep flooding the job market with cheap labor. People are going to look for a solutions and when the left and the center don't have any then the fascists are going to step up. They aren't actually going to solve the problem but they will end democracy by promising to solve it.
OK, you don't work in software. Good tech companies don't outsource core development. They hire in house. They also have a huge presence in every country they'd hire from. Microsoft can just as easily open an office in India, Poland, or anywhere else. All the major players are the same. They outsource things like cleaning the office, sometimes some shitty work they don't want to do, like content moderation, they might outsource printer maintenance or helpdesk operations. However, the H1Bs are usually
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Labor in Europe isn't cheap.
If you want cheap labor you need to go to Africa. But it won't be good.
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> OK, you don't work in software. Good tech companies don't outsource core development. They hire in house.
I was a software engineer at Microsoft for 22 years.
For all 22 of those years, Microsoft had core developers on every product who were not Microsoft employees.
You may want to look up the "permatemps" lawsuit from the early 00s. Microsoft had so many permanant contractor "non employees" that they were succesfully sued for the practice.
Microsoft has all kinds of legal sub-structures and "at a distance
Re:It's just for show (Score:4, Informative)
> The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro.
Those are the contractors.
> I'm open to other suggestions but I have yet to hear a single one that is both viable and actually works.
I don't really oppose H1b, but arrest one CEO who is hiring people illegally, and this will stop.
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> they will end democracy
Inexplicable use of the future tense.
Instead (Score:3)
So, instead of hiring these foreign workers and bringing them to the US, they will hire them and employ them in their home countries at even lower wages.
Been there done that! (Score:4, Interesting)
20 years ago there was a big push to outsource to India; following IBM and others. What stopped it? Well you can't legally do much of anything to them. You can protect yourself legally if you import the workers and you can likely abuse them more too. I've seen corps in my state get burned by Indian firms who realized they did all the work and got little money; they didn't need their owners, just a US marketing dept. and compete against their exploiter... cheaper. Hell, during the housing collapse, some of the contractors turned around and bought their "owners" then laid off most those useless rent seekers.
Maybe they will realize they can make US workers relocate abroad for lower pay and still be able to sue them? (as long as they are contractors.)
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So move them to offices in Thailand or Viet Nam or a bunch of other places. You do not have to contract out the work, just create a local subsidiary.
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2 reasons that usually doesn't happen unless you are a very large company.
1.Offices cost money to lease and staff with the necessary recruiters, HR, and other support employees.
2. Employment laws tend to protect the employee better in most of the rest of the world, unless you are in a poor and very small country. The USA is known for it's "business friendly" employment laws and is an outlier when compared to the rest of the world.
I worked for a Fortune 500 who had offices in India, but they could absorb the
From experience (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of smart folks from India working on these named companies. Yes, it is disheartening to spend months of your time writing knowledge base articles, documents and train your replacement. Been there, done that. Meanwhile, others have ways away to be considered for a junior role yet rock a much higher title on their signatures. Exactly as some born and raised here.
The obvious outcome: companies will start eliminating positions on US soil and hire even more positions from thei
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I don't disagree with much of what you said BUT it stands to reason that it's already the case that companies could outsource. Instead, they've chosen to go through the complex process of bringing H1B visa workers to the US.
I know in my company (which has a huge office in India) that they find it harder to keep high-performing Indian workers over there than it is here. The high-performing ones switch companies frequently.
So I'm not sure what the calculus looks like but it might be the case that H1B >
Lazy reporting (Score:2)
At the risk of getting down-modded into oblivion, seeing the tone of most comments so far... Neither TFA nor the Reuters source care to explain how blocking the conversion from H-1B to Permanent Residency (aka Green Card) will prevent companies from hiring new foreign workers by applying for H-1B or any other visa type. Foreign workers (like myself in a different country) are usually happy to stay on any work visa and wait it out until whenever the combination of "administration policy" + "permanent residen
Cue the usual crowd (Score:1)
If H1B were really about skilled foreigners filling gaps that can't be filled otherwise, their salaries would be high relative to US citizens.
In a free market, your salary is proportional to how hard it is to replace you:
Push buttons like a trained seal? Peanuts.
Know where to place the [1]the thousand dollar chalk mark? Mid six figures easy. [smithsonianmag.com]
So what do H1Bs at Microsoft make?
If these links
[2]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=h1b+... [duckduckgo.com]
are to be believed, kinda average for a software engineer. Maybe even a little low. Boston
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/#ixzz2lRMjrfit
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=h1b+median+salary+microsoft&ia=web
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> If H1B were really about skilled foreigners filling gaps that can't be filled otherwise, their salaries would be high relative to US citizens.
How so? If there were a limited number of such jobs and a large candidate pool and every successful candidate got a visa without restrictions fairly and honestly, simple "supply and demand" predict exactly the opposite.
Just another bribe solicitation (Score:2)
He's running the same playbook. Threaten to tariff/investigate/restrict/ban an industry and then wait for that industry to pay him off.
re (Score:1)
What about the 3 million Workers that are IN the country now are they gonna get Re-Reviewed and kicked out? Should Send the FBI down to the company to do a sweep! Heard about the Amazon Warehouses in Canada? Full of Indian Workers!
Excellent Move (Score:5, Interesting)
The fraud of firing 6000 workers and immediately hiring 6000 H-1Bs was too in your face.
The Dept of Labor did the right thing by suspending Microsoft from the PERM program.
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Founds the commie insurgent.
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Not yet. Only when Diaper Don tries to take over our elections. Bag bang comrade.
Uncalled for (Score:3)
I know this is the internet, but the parent's statement does not deserve such an insult. Asking why a company would claim to have issues finding employees while they are simultaneously laying off employees, which is contradictory, is a reasonable question. Holding companies accountable, that use programs like this seemingly for their own benefit at the expense of Americans in the labor pool, benefits everyone.
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As much as I despise a lot of what this current administration is doing, we still have to acknowledge when they do something right. With the facts currently at hand this seems like they are doing the right thing here and I encourage them to do more right things!
What still remains to be seen is whether Microsoft will announce some sort of investment and then this issue goes away. These tactics are pretty common these days. We no longer enforce antitrust laws regardless of who's in power, so it is no mystery
Re: Uncalled for (Score:5, Interesting)
> As much as I despise a lot of what this current administration is doing, we still have to acknowledge when they do something right. With the facts currently at hand this seems like they are doing the right thing here and I encourage them to do more right things!
The fact is they blocked several companies, but didn't lower the number of visas being issued . So what they are doing is redistributing who gets visas (which smacks of favoritism and corruption), without actually lowering the number of jobs taken by non-US citizens. This is a favor to the companies that will be granted the newly available visas. It will be revealing to see who gets them.
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> The fact is they blocked several companies, but didn't lower the number of visas being issued . So what they are doing is redistributing who gets visas (which smacks of favoritism and corruption)
Except they are excluding the companies found abusing the system, in turn leaving the companies complying with the rules alone. Complying with the H1B program as enacted by Congress is neither favoritism nor corruption. Quite the opposite actually.
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Stopped Clock moments. They're doing the right thing but for intensely wrong reasons. (Gotta wonder about JD Vance though, with his mail order Beard-Bride to hide the fact that he's one of Peter Thiel's paid buttboys.)
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> As much as I despise a lot of what this current administration is doing, we still have to acknowledge when they do something right.
Ah, you are new here aren't you. :-)
Re: Uncalled for (Score:2)
I agree. I am a "lib" and don't agree with much the Trump administration does. H1B has been abused for decades. Tech companies use it to hire workers at low rates and then abuse them as they become "indentured servants," afraid of getting fired in which case they have to beg for new employment and sponsorship to stay in the country. The system has been gamed for years. Want to hire an H1B and get a lawyer? The lawyer will tell you two things: Make a job ad which basically asks for the exact resume of
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Correct. And this is not just unique to the US. In Canada we've been making an even lower tier joke, that Tim Hortons has been abusing the temporary foreign worker program. We all know that Tata and Wipro are absolutely abusing it.
Re: Excellent Move (Score:1)
Are you sure you don't mean American?
Re: Excellent Move (Score:2)
Not so much fraud as it is disloyalty and disrespectful, the government and corporations demand loyalty and respect from us citizens but have none for us in return
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How was it not fraud?
H1B is/was intended for worker shortages: for roles you couldn't fill domestically. It was not supposed to decrease the wage of the role, but (in theory) keep it at parity. It was always a ruse, but that was the premise.
If you're firing people and then hiring others at a fraction of the pay, you're literally abusing it. You've applied under false premise. That's fraud.
Re: Excellent Move (Score:4, Informative)
Literally every company that uses H1B, abuses H1B.
A few years ago, my company had to renew sponsorship for one of our H1B developers. They really wanted to keep the guy (and he *was* good at his job). As part of the process, we had to post the position and then "prove" that we couldn't find anyone in the US to fill it. The job posting was created to itemize the exact skillset this developer had, and the exact job duties this developer did. Any candidate that didn't meet the requirements *exactly* was rejected.
This kind of stuff happens all the time.
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This is true. I like my H1b coworkers (so I definitely won't report anything), but I've never seen a company apply for one in a way that wasn't fraud.
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I'm not sure I'd call it "fraud" per se. Companies usually comply with the letter of the law, just not the spirit .
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> I'm not sure I'd call it "fraud" per se. Companies usually comply with the letter of the law, just not the spirit .
The letter of the H1B law says its for when qualified domestic workers cannot be found and that the pay cannot be lower than a qualified domestic worker. So yes, H1B is routinely abused, not complied with by law nor by spirit.
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It's all in the definition of "qualified". If a company defines "qualified" as a person who has the exact characteristics of the H1B person they want to hire (or keep), then they are keeping the letter of the law, even if not the spirit. The law cannot mandate how wide or narrow the "qualifications" must be, leaving a nice big loophole for companies to walk through. Using a loophole does not by itself constitute fraud.
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Because the whole process is stupid. If the company really wants to keep/hire a specific person, they shouldn't have to jump through hoops to do so. But if the only way to keep that person legally hired is to abuse a stupid system already in place, then so be it.
America is a 25% functional unemployment (Score:2)
That means one quarter of working adults cannot support themselves. That's about 40 million people. So yeah we don't need to bring more people into this country we have plenty of people. Nobody is going to convince me that all 40 million of those people are too stupid to be trained on the tasks H1Bs do.
And I could care less about innovation in this country. All that means is who owns the patents and it's not going to be me owning the patents so why the fuck would I care? I still have to pay the license
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> That means one quarter of working adults cannot support themselves.
Huh? No, it doesn't mean that. Though the system is stupid, that does not mean a quarter of working adults cannot support themselves. What it does mean, is that wages are lower than they would otherwise have been. Those people who get beat out by H1B applicants, can still get jobs, they just can't get them for as much money as they could, if the H1B people weren't competing for them.
And what on earth do patents have to do with anything? To get a patent, you have to apply for them, paying all the legal fees.
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If your defense is "everyone does it", then why do we even have laws and rules?
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My defense? Did you take my post as defending the practice? Not at all, you completely misunderstood. No, it's completely indefensible.
Excellent Solicitation (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be true, except everyone who has been paying attention knows that all they have to do is buy enough Trumpcoins and the problem will dry up and blow away without fanfare.
Don't even have to do that (Score:3)
Just do some light corporate restructuring on paper and hire them all back under a different corporate entity. Trump will look the other way because he's all about the cheap labor. The right wing has always been about cheap labor. Frankly so have conservatives. They talk a good game but it's just talk. Comforting lies
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I was a dev lead at Microsoft. I believe I was asked to support immigration fraud.
I had an employee on a VISA. He was in a junior level role.
The immigration attorney asked me to verify that the job requirements for his job were:
- masters degree
- expertise in python
- (a few other things)
He had a masters degree. He had the other things on the list.
Problem was, the job he actually had was an entry level dev job. It was the exact job I got hired in at at the beginning of my career. For the level/job he was
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> The fraud of firing 6000 workers and immediately hiring 6000 H-1Bs was too in your face.
Except that isn't what happened. So you're both wrong and stupid.
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H1B abuse has been happening for decades. "Unicorn Job" listings are an indication that the company is just doing the motions and knows they won't hire an American. This change needed to happen even if for the Trump admin it's a Stopped Clock Moment.
Re:Excellent Move, includes universities (Score:2)
@USLaborIG: "I am announcing a historic investigation into the J-1 visa fraud involving nine major American universities — Pit, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT. Subpoenas have been served; investigations are underway."
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Pure capitalism.