Vice President JD Vance announced that the US government is suspending a permanent residency program for several technology companies accused of defrauding the H-1B worker visa system. Vance said the targeted businesses abused federal programs that allow H-1B visa holders to apply for green cards. He alleged the companies intentionally under-advertised jobs domestically so they could seek international employees instead of hiring American citizens, and he singled out Microsoft as a reported offender. According to Vance, companies use the lack of domestic response to replace American workers with what he described as effectively foreign indentured servants, adding that no US company has used the system more than Microsoft.
Microsoft responded in a statement, saying the vast majority of its US employees are Americans. The company said it looks forward to providing the Administration with additional information. It said that of the roughly 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80 percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees rather than to hire new people. Microsoft said the remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to work for it, and that these equal only 1 percent of its US workforce. The company said these are not new arrivals to the country, and that it only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of the visa category. Engadget said it reached out to Adobe for comment and would update its post with any statement.
Reuters reported that, according to statistics from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services department, Amazon is the top employer of H-1B visa recipients. Amazon is followed by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Apple and Microsoft, according to those figures. The article did not say whether Amazon, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys or Apple had responded to the announcement, and it did not identify any of them as targets beyond Microsoft.
The announcement follows similar enforcement actions in recent years. In August, the Department of Justice won a $3.2 million settlement from OpenAI on claims that it under-advertised job openings domestically and instead preferred workers with temporary employment visas. Similar cases were brought and settled against Meta in 2021 and against Apple in 2023. The article did not specify the month in which the OpenAI settlement was won beyond August, nor did it provide further details on the Meta and Apple cases.
In a related move, the government said it would investigate nine higher education institutions for similar alleged abuses of J-1 visa programs for international students. The institutions named in the article are Harvard University, Yale University and Stanford University. The article did not name the other six institutions. The J-1 program is used for international students, and the investigation concerns the same type of alleged abuse described in the technology company cases.
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