JD Vance Announces Historic Crackdown On H-1B Visa Program

Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump Administration is suspending Microsoft from the permanent labor certification program, known as PERM. The program allows employers to sponsor certain foreign workers, including those on H-1B visas, for employment-based green cards after demonstrating that no qualified U.S. workers are available for the positions.

While speaking during a White House press conference, Vance stated that Microsoft had used the system more extensively than any other company. He cited company actions from the prior year, noting that Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers while obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance told reporters. He described H-1B workers in this context as effectively foreign indentured servants because loss of the job can require them to leave the country, and emphasized that they typically earn less than Americans in comparable roles.

Vance further outlined what the administration views as a pattern of abuse in the recruitment step required before PERM certification. “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” the vice president added.

“You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

POLL: Would JD Vance Make A Good President?

BREAKING: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several major IT outsourcing firms from a key employment-based green card program, accusing them of abusing the visa system at the expense of American workers.

Vice President JD Vance singled out Microsoft,… pic.twitter.com/vDkYogbGdZ

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 8, 2026

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling added that the suspension of new and pending PERM applications also covers Adobe and several information-technology outsourcing firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini. The Department of Labor will not accept or process applications involving these companies for the duration of the suspension.

The announcement also addressed J-1 exchange-visitor visas. Vance said nine universities would face further investigation for higher-than-average use of the program, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The steps follow a Department of Homeland Security proposal, issued the previous day, for a $70,000 fee that schools would pay for each international student participating in Optional Practical Training, a program that permits work related to a student’s field of study. The H-1B category is limited to specialty occupations, and technology firms account for a large share of approvals, with nearly three-quarters going to workers from India in recent data.

RELATED: U.S. Imposes Visa Restrictions On South Africa Over Race-Based Discrimination