Microsoft Was Cut Off From Green Cards Hours Before Nadella's Medal

On Thursday morning, Vice President JD Vance stood at a White House news conference and announced that Microsoft was being suspended from a program that lets companies sponsor green cards for workers who came to the U.S. on H-1B visas. The administration accused the company of fraud. That same day, according to the Associated Press, President Trump was scheduled to hand Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Washington is now punishing and honoring the same company on the same day, and the punishment is the part with consequences for thousands of employees.

What Vance said, and the numbers he used

Vance described the process at issue: before applying to the Department of Labor, a company must advertise a job in the U.S. to show it needs a foreign worker because qualified Americans are not available. He said employers place ads in small-town newspapers and then cite the lack of responses. That description matches the Labor Department's permanent labor certification process, known as PERM, which is the first step for most employer-sponsored green cards. The AP did not name the program, and officials did not say how long the suspension lasts.

"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft," Vance said, according to the AP.

He then laid out his math. Microsoft, he said, laid off 6,000 American workers last year while obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. By his count, that meant every laid-off worker was replaced by roughly one and a half foreign workers. He called H-1B holders "effectively foreign indentured servants," arguing that they must leave the country if they lose their jobs and are paid less than Americans in the same positions.

"Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," he said.

Microsoft's answer

Microsoft disputed the framing. In a statement carried in NBC News' version of the AP report, the company said "the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans." It said 80% of the 6,000 H-1B applications it submitted last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than to hire new people. The rest, it said, were for people already in the U.S. who chose to join Microsoft, amounting to 1% of its U.S. workforce. The company said it looked forward to giving the administration more information.

The two sides are counting different things. Vance's comparison sets a layoff figure against total visa filings. Microsoft's reply says most of those filings kept people it already employed on the payroll. Neither side published the underlying data on Thursday.

Not the first target, and not the last

The suspension is the largest move yet in a campaign that started this summer. In July the administration opened an investigation into alleged fraud in the H-1B and PERM programs. On September 8, Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito announced that he had suspended PERM filings by the IT services firm Cognizant and the software company Cloudera, in coordination with the White House Fraud Task Force. "Threats to American workers will NOT be tolerated," D'Esposito wrote, according to PTI.

D'Esposito was at Thursday's news conference, along with Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche and Andrew Ferguson, according to a photo caption from FOX 13 Seattle. The station reported that Adobe and several technology outsourcing firms were also suspended from sponsoring green cards, and that Vance said he would support eliminating the H-1B program entirely. "Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades," he said.

Vance also went after universities. He accused schools of abusing J-1 exchange visas and named nine for further investigation: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT. A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $70,000 fee, paid by schools, for each international student working in the U.S. under Optional Practical Training.

Why Microsoft, and why it matters beyond Redmond

Vance has been building toward this for over a year. In July 2025, after Microsoft cut about 9,000 jobs in a single round, he publicly questioned why a company laying off thousands of Americans was also applying for H-1B visas. Microsoft eliminated roughly 16,000 positions across several rounds that year.

The practical effect lands on the workers in the middle. H-1B visas are time-limited, and a green card application is how many long-term foreign employees stay. A freeze on new labor certifications does not deport anyone, but it stops the clock for people who were waiting to start, and it gives every engineer on a temporary visa at Microsoft a reason to wonder whether to stay. Tech companies are the largest users of the H-1B program, and nearly three-quarters of approvals go to workers from India, the AP noted.

It also sets a precedent that reaches well past one company. Until now, the crackdown had targeted IT outsourcing firms, the usual villains in the H-1B debate. Microsoft is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and its CEO came to the U.S. from India and has long pushed for immigration reform. If its sponsorship can be frozen on a fraud allegation announced at a press conference, every large employer that files PERM applications, which includes most large tech companies, now has to treat its immigration pipeline as a political exposure.

The details that would settle the argument, including what the fraud finding rests on, how long the suspension runs and whether Microsoft can contest it, were not released on Thursday. The medal ceremony, by the AP's account, was still on the schedule.