Microsoft, Adobe suspended from green-card labor program — SkimNews
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- Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the Department of Labor will stop accepting or processing new Permanent Labor Certification applications for Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro, and HCL.
- Microsoft and Adobe were suspended specifically "due to multiple active federal investigations," Sonderling said.
- Since 2009, the suspended companies requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received over 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications — "hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers," per Sonderling.
- Vice President JD Vance singled out Microsoft, citing 6,000 layoffs in 2025 and claiming the company "replaced" those workers with H-1B visa holders, and said Microsoft would be denied green-certification applications "until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first."
- President Trump is awarding the National Medal of Science at the same summit to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and AMD's Lisa Su — all immigrants — a tension Vance navigated by saying "99% of American citizens" support CEOs like Musk and Su but not mass IT-staff hiring.
- Microsoft's Nadella is from India, moved to the U.S. in 1988, and joined Microsoft in 1992; Huang and Su were born in Taiwan and Musk in South Africa.
Why it matters: Seven named firms — two of them (Microsoft, Adobe) under active federal investigation — are now barred from sponsoring workers for permanent residency, potentially disrupting a pipeline that delivered 100,000+ green cards since 2009. The suspensions land weeks before midterms, with Vance explicitly tying the crackdown to Microsoft's 6,000 layoffs, reframing H-1B hiring as a political liability for any tech firm cutting domestic staff.
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