Washington Pulls Eight Companies Off the Green Card Line

The Labor Department has suspended eight large employers — including Microsoft and Adobe — from the program that lets companies sponsor foreign workers for employment-based green cards, Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday. While the suspensions stand, the department says it will not accept new applications from those firms and will not process the ones already pending.

The same action opened a second front. The department's inspector general has launched investigations into nine universities over alleged fraud in the J-1 exchange visitor program, and subpoenas have already gone out. Both moves come from the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which Vance leads.

The practical stakes are large. PERM — permanent labor certification — is the gate an employer has to walk through before sponsoring a worker for a green card, and it requires the company to show there were not enough qualified American workers available and that hiring a foreign worker will not undercut the wages or conditions of similar U.S. employees. Shutting eight major filers out of that process, even temporarily, closes off a well-used path.

A note on sourcing: the details of Thursday's announcement below come from a single outlet's account. The Labor Department has not published a release on the action, and no transcript of the vice president's remarks had been obtained as of publication.

Who Got Suspended, and What Labor Says They Did

The eight firms are Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini, as reported by The Daily Wire. Five of the eight are India-linked IT services companies, which makes a reaction from New Delhi and the Indian tech industry close to certain.

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the targeted companies have collectively requested nearly three million foreign workers since 2009, and have received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Those figures are attributed to Sonderling; no written department release laying out the methodology has been published as of this writing.

Microsoft is also under investigation for alleged H-1B violations and for alleged discrimination based on citizenship or national origin. Vance tied that probe directly to the roughly 6,000 jobs Microsoft cut in 2025, saying the company was collecting thousands of H-1Bs and green cards at the same time.

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

Vance also said that "for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants." That characterization is contested. A Microsoft spokesperson told Politico the company filed about 6,000 H-1B applications last fiscal year and that 80% of them were extensions or changes of status for workers already on the payroll rather than new hires. The company says it files petitions only for workers who qualify and pays H-1B employees in comparable roles comparable wages. Adobe did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.

Nine Universities and the J-1 Question

The inspector general's inquiries cover Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT. Vance said J-1 visa holders make up roughly 61% of the people doing federally funded research at those nine schools, against a national average of about 38%, and that an American researcher can cost a university around $20,000 a year more than a comparable J-1 worker.

"Something weird is going on at these universities."

Those percentages and the $20,000 figure are the vice president's assertions, and the administration has not published the underlying calculation. No responses from the nine universities had been obtained as of publication.

What Is Not Yet Known

Several basic questions remain open. The announcement did not spell out how long the PERM suspensions last, what legal authority they rest on, whether the companies have an appeal path, or what happens to foreign employees whose green card cases were already in the pipeline. Those are exactly the sort of gaps that tend to end up in federal court, most likely as an Administrative Procedure Act challenge.

The task force, for its part, says it has uncovered billions of dollars in fraud and secured more than 200 convictions, a number that includes pandemic-era unemployment insurance cases. That is an administration claim and has not been independently verified here.

Separately, the White House has proposed a six-figure fee on H-1B applications, a proposal that would reshape the economics of the program for exactly the kind of high-volume filers named Thursday.

Next comes the paperwork and the pushback: subpoena returns at the inspector general's office, formal responses from the suspended companies and the named universities, and whatever the Indian government and its IT trade groups decide to say about five of their largest firms being shut out of the American green card line at once.