Microsoft has been barred by the White House from hiring skilled international workers on a permanent basis through a widely used visa programme, alongside several other technology firms.
US Vice-President JD Vance on Thursday accused Microsoft and the other companies of committing fraud through their use of the H-1B visa programme, together with a related process that allows workers from abroad to become permanent US residents.
Vance claimed that Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the US, had effectively been replacing American workers with “foreign indentured servants.”
“No company in the US has abused this system more than Microsoft,” he said.
He made similar accusations about Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
Speaking at the same conference, Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the US government would not process any new or pending Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM) applications from Microsoft or the seven other companies.
Sonderling said companies such as Microsoft, as well as US universities, had turned into “visa mills” that were “flooding” the US with foreign workers.
The BBC has contacted all of the companies for comment.
The H-1B visa, a precursor to anyone seeking to go through the PERM process, is capped at 85,000 per year.
A spokeswoman for Microsoft told the BBC that “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.” The company employs more than 200,000 people worldwide.
Vance said on Thursday that Microsoft had laid off about 6,000 workers and filed 6,800 H-1B visa applications over the same period, claiming this was evidence of the company using foreign workers to replace US workers and “undercut” their wages.
The Microsoft spokeswoman said 80% of the H-1B visa filings the company submitted over the last fiscal year related to employees already working at Microsoft, rather than new hires.
She added that international workers Microsoft does hire through the H-1B visa programme are paid the same level of compensation a worker from the US would receive.
According to Ellis, a company which aids many tech companies with the process of hiring skilled workers from abroad, the median salary for an H-1B worker at Microsoft is $155,000.
“We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information,” the Microsoft spokeswoman said.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s long-time chief executive, was at the White House on Thursday to receive a novel medal for technology innovation from President Donald Trump.
Introducing Nadella during the event, Trump said the White House was “honoured” to be awarding the medal to him and that it was “so well-deserved.”
Other tech industry figures to receive medals from Trump were Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Sergey Brin, and Michael Dell.
Nadella and most of the other medal recipients were also present at other recent White House events, including a lunch on artificial intelligence and a state dinner for China’s President Xi Jinping.
Microsoft, however, was the focus of Vance’s criticism on Thursday.
“Our message to Microsoft is quite simple: You’re a great American company, you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.
He explained that his reference to workers from abroad in such a way was due to the fact that, should they be fired or laid off from the company that sponsored their visa, they “have to leave” the US.
Typically, such a worker has a 60-day grace period in that circumstance. Last month, the US government proposed eliminating that grace period altogether.
Every major tech firm in the US hires international workers through the H-1B visa programme, and has done so for many years, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, and more. None of those companies were included in Vance’s comments on Thursday.
The programme has been aimed at highly skilled or specialised workers that a company needs, but is unable to find or hire domestically, for decades.
The PERM programme is a pathway for such workers to become permanent US residents, often leading to a Green Card that would allow them to remain and work in the US indefinitely.
During the last fiscal year, the US Department of Labor certified more than 130,000 PERM applications across ten business categories.
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