Just three months after Microsoft shot down a racist conspiracy theory claiming the company was laying off thousands of American workers so it could replace them with foreigners via the H-1B visa program, the Trump administration has suspended the company's ability to apply for green cards for workers on the H-1B program, accusing it of fraudulently using the program to replace American workers with foreigners.
There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft
JD Vance, vice president of the United States of America
"The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers," US vice president JD Vance said (via AP). "Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years—probably the last several decades.
"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft ... Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefitted from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants."
Calling H-1B visa holders "indentured servants" is certainly a choice, painting legal immigration as a form of human trafficking and the workers as victims, rather than specialists who've chosen to work in the United States.
Microsoft will still be able to hire non-American workers on a temporary basis via the H-1B program. It simply won't be able to apply to make them permanent, and thus grant them permanent residency, via the green card program—something that clearly does not comport with the Trump administration's intense focus on mass deportations.
"Our message to Microsoft and to any other foreign or domestic corporation is quite simple," Vance said. "We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America, but we want you to employ American workers.
"And so our message to Microsoft is you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants."
Responding to Vance's message, Microsoft issued a statement saying it looks forward to "providing the administration with additional information," including that 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the previous fiscal year "were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees," not to hire new employees. The remaining 20%, Microsoft said, were for new employees who were already in the country legally, rather than new arrivals.
Microsoft also addressed Vance's "indentured servants" comment directly, as well as claims that H-1B workers in general are paid significantly less than their American counterparts, saying it pays employees on H-1B visas "the same as any other employees doing comparable work."
Ironically, the suspension of Microsoft's ability to apply for permanent residency for H-1B visa holders comes on the same day that US president Donald Trump presented Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Other recipients honored today include X owner Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Dell Technologies chief Michael Dell, all of whom have been friendly with the Trump administration.
Trump recently disclosed significant Nvidia stock trades made in August, according to a new Reuters report. In September, the president renamed artificial intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and allowed the AI industry in the US to self-regulate.
