Analysis
On October 8, Vice President JD Vance announced the Trump administration was suspending Microsoft from the Labor Department's PERM program, the usual first step toward an employer-sponsored green card, according to Fortune. The Labor Department will not accept new PERM applications from Microsoft, or process the ones already pending, until further notice. Vance said the suspension would last as long as needed and that the administration has tools to extend it indefinitely.
Microsoft wasn't alone:
- Microsoft -- the largest single PERM user, with 3,161 applications ruled on in the fiscal year ending September 2025.
- Adobe -- suspended alongside Microsoft.
- Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Capgemini -- the six IT outsourcing firms cut off in the same action.
“Microsoft wasn't alone: - Microsoft -- the largest single PERM user, with 3,161 applications ruled on in the fiscal year ending September 2025.”
The Nadella Angle
Nadella's own history with the visa system is the detail giving this story its edge. He came to the US in 1988 to study computer science, joined Microsoft in 1992, and became CEO in 2014. In December 1992 he married his wife, Anu, in India while holding a green card; her visa application was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident, and the wait could have taken years. In June 1994 he gave up his green card at the US embassy in New Delhi and reverted to an H-1B visa so she could join him immediately in the US, later regaining permanent residency and eventually becoming a citizen. He recounts the episode in his 2017 memoir, Hit Refresh.
Vance's numbers: Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while bringing in 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards, a contrast he's using to argue the company put foreign hiring ahead of its own workforce. Microsoft disputes the framing directly -- the company says about 6,000 H-1B petitions were filed last fiscal year, 80% of them extensions or status changes for existing employees, with new hires making up roughly 1% of its US workforce, and that it pays H-1B employees comparably to everyone else doing the same work.
What the headline misses: the White House hasn't published evidence of fraud at Microsoft specifically -- according to the Seattle Times, the administration offered none -- and former senior USCIS adviser Doug Rand called the policy "incoherent," since a green card actually reduces a worker's dependence on their employer, the opposite of the leverage Vance says he's trying to break.
The suspension carries no stated end date. With Vance saying the administration has tools to extend it indefinitely, Microsoft's green-card pipeline for thousands of already-pending applicants is effectively frozen, with no appeal process and no court date in sight.
