The U.S. government announced on Thursday that it would suspend Microsoft and several other companies from a program that allows their foreign workers to apply for green cards, accusing them of visa fraud.
The Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM) allows employers to hire foreign workers to work permanently in the United States. It serves as a primary gateway for foreign workers holding H-1B visas to seek permanent residency.
The H-1B visa program, which is meant to allow companies to bring in foreign talent for positions that are impossible to fill with American workers, has become "rife with fraud" over the last decades, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said at an anti-fraud press conference in Washington on Thursday.
Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year, and at the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. That means every worker that Microsoft lays off, they replace that worker with one and a half foreign "indentured servants," Vance said.
He said that the tech giant is one of a handful of companies to be barred indefinitely from the PERM program following an ongoing anti-fraud investigation, including Adobe, Cognizant and Infosys.
In response, Microsoft said in a post on its website on Thursday that the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.
Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications submitted in the last fiscal year, 80 percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees, the tech giant said.
US government suspends several major companies from green card program
