Washington freezes green-card sponsorship at Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcers

Vance's figure of one and a half foreign hires for every Microsoft layoff holds only if his two counts are added together ^[19]. Set against 6,000 job cuts, 6,300 H-1B visas plus nearly 3,000 green cards come to about 1.55 per layoff ^[20]. The visas alone come to 1.05 ^[21]. Adding them treats the green-card recipients and the visa holders as different people ^[20].

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling's group totals are harder to read. He said the eight companies requested almost 3 million foreign workers since 2009, and their 230,000-plus H-1B approvals are under 8% of that ^{[1][2][6][15]}. The 100,000-plus certifications, spread over roughly 17 years, average about 5,900 a year for all eight together ^[16]. Microsoft's nearly 3,000 green cards last year, on Vance's count, would be about half that average by itself (green cards and certifications are different tallies, so the comparison is loose) ^[17]. Either Microsoft takes a large share of the group's recent flow or the flow has grown since 2009. Neither official split the totals by company.

The legal exposure sits in the certification, or rather in the one statement it makes. Under PERM, an employer asks the Labor Department to certify that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job, a step required before most employment-based green-card petitions ^[5]. Vance says those statements were false. "So the fraud is that they're making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal," he said ^[22]. He described how it works: "They'll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper," he said ^[23]. Sonderling cited active federal investigations ^[4].

The suspension could be a bargaining position. Vance said the aim was to change companies' behavior and not to punish them, and Trump planned to give Microsoft's chief executive a medal later that same Thursday, according to Semafor ^[7][9]. It could instead be the front end of prosecutions, if Attorney General Todd Blanche's warning of criminal cases against companies becomes a charge ^[8]. Or it could be walked back. In May the administration partly retreated on a plan to make H-1B holders apply for permanent residency from outside the US ^[12]. Businesses have also challenged the proposed H-1B fee of more than $100,000 in court ^[10][11].

I think the frozen queue is the cost that arrives first, and employees carry it. Because Labor will not process pending applications, anyone whose green card rests on a filing by one of the eight waits until the suspension lifts ^[3]. For the outsourcers, the freeze lands on top of the H-1B fee ^[10]. Foreign workers were almost a quarter of the US STEM workforce in 2023, Semafor reported, citing the American Immigration Council ^[14].

The administration is acting ahead of Congress. Vance said "we have tools in the administration to make this program work better for the American people," then added: "A lot more we could do if Congress was willing to play ball." ^[13]

The case for treating this as an operating risk weakens if Labor resumes Microsoft's pending applications within weeks. The medal makes that plausible ^[9]. It strengthens if a charge is filed against any of the eight, because the 100,000-plus certifications the group received since 2009 would then be potential evidence in the investigations Sonderling cited ^[6][4].