WASHINGTON — The Trump administration walked into the White House briefing room on Thursday carrying eight names and a sledgehammer. Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini — some of the largest employers of foreign technology workers on the planet — have been suspended from the federal program that companies use to sponsor workers for permanent residency, in what officials called the opening strike of a campaign against work-visa fraud.
The program is called Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM. It is the gate every employer must pass through before sponsoring most employment-based green cards. For the eight companies named on Thursday, that gate has slammed shut: no new applications will be accepted, and no pending ones will be processed.
Microsoft, singled out
Vice President JD Vance made Microsoft the centerpiece of the case, flanked at the podium by Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling and Attorney General Todd Blanche. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said.
The numbers he laid out were pointed. Microsoft laid off about 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying in official filings that it could not find qualified American employees for the jobs. The same company was then approved for more than 6,000 H-1B visas and filed 3,682 PERM applications — including nearly 1,000 for the same positions held by the Americans it had just let go.
“Our message to Microsoft is: you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to the announcement.
The outsourcing giants
Sonderling named the six Indian-headquartered or India-linked outsourcing firms one by one: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. He said Microsoft and Adobe were being suspended separately because of multiple active federal investigations.
“We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling said.
He framed the move as cutting off what he called decades of abuse. Since 2009, Sonderling said, the companies named had requested almost three million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals, and obtained over 100,000 permanent labor certifications.
The universities, too
The announcement did not stop at corporate America. The administration also said it was investigating nine universities — including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Brown — over allegations that international students were being used to undercut American wages. Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas had already been issued and investigators would examine whether “foreign influence, improper financial relationships, or visa abuse” were compromising federally funded research.
What the freeze actually does
It is worth being precise about the mechanics, because this is not a visa ban. PERM is the first step in employer-sponsored permanent residency: a company must prove no qualified American is available for a position before filing a green card petition. Thursday’s order freezes that pipeline at the eight firms. It does not automatically cancel H-1B visas held by their employees. But for tens of thousands of foreign workers — many of them Indian professionals at the outsourcing giants — the path to a green card through their employer is now blocked indefinitely.
Why this matters
This is the most aggressive federal action against employer use of foreign-worker programs in a generation, and it hits where it hurts most: the green card queue. H-1B fights have raged for decades without ever touching the PERM machinery underneath. By suspending household names like Microsoft and Adobe alongside the outsourcing firms, the administration is testing whether the political cost of a confrontation with Silicon Valley is smaller than it used to be. For India’s IT industry, the signal is unmistakable — the pipeline that carried a generation of engineers to American residency is narrowing. And for American tech workers who have spent years arguing they were undercut by cheaper visa labor, Thursday was the day Washington finally said they were right.
The immediate question is what happens to the applications already sitting on Labor Department desks — and how the companies, several of which have powerful lobbying operations, fight back.
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