White House Suspends Microsoft From Green Card Program

The Trump administration suspended Microsoft and seven other employers from the Labor Department's Permanent Labor Certification Program on Oct. 8 — a move that blocks the path Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself traveled from H-1B worker to citizen.

Vice President JD Vance announced the suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, and six IT services firms — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini. Hours later, President Donald Trump presented Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

The Labor Department said it will not accept new PERM applications from the eight companies, nor process those already in the pipeline, according to Axios. The takeaway: thousands of pending green card cases are now frozen with no stated end date.

What does the suspension actually change?

The move does not touch H-1B visas, the temporary work permits overseen by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. PERM comes later in the chain: an employer must advertise a job and show no qualified, available U.S. worker can fill it before sponsoring a foreign employee for permanent residency. Most applicants already work in the U.S. on H-1Bs.

Microsoft is the program's heaviest user. The Labor Department ruled on 3,161 of its applications in the fiscal year that ended in September 2025 — more than any other employer, according to a GeekWire analysis. That is roughly 12 adjudicated cases per business day for one company alone.

Asked how long the suspension would last, Vance said it would "last as long as it needs to," adding the administration has "a number of tools to suspend it indefinitely."

Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS adviser in the Biden administration, called the move "incoherent," telling the Associated Press that a green card frees a worker from depending on an employer for immigration status. No company has said how many employees are affected; Microsoft has not disclosed a figure.

Why did Vance single out Microsoft?

"Now there has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft," Vance said at a White House news conference.

"Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers," he said. "At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards." He added: "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."

Vance also attacked the H-1B program broadly, saying it "has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades." The White House has not provided evidence of fraud by Microsoft, The Seattle Times reported.

Federal data complicates the vice president's framing. Microsoft received 6,258 H-1B approvals in fiscal 2025, ranking third behind Amazon (19,178) and Meta (6,294) — neither of which was suspended, CNBC reported based on USCIS data. About two-thirds of Microsoft's approvals went to people already working at the company.

Vance acknowledged the tension. "Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them," he said, but added the administration would "deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first." The gap between the accusation and the published record remains unresolved.

How did Microsoft respond?

"We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce. That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information," Microsoft said in a statement.

"Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people," the company said. "The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."

Microsoft also rejected any suggestion its visa holders are underpaid. "We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work," it said. Notably, the statement did not directly address the PERM suspension itself.

What about Nadella's own path?

Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India, and came to the U.S. in 1988 to study computer science, earning a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1990. He joined Microsoft in 1992 and has been CEO since 2014.

His route to citizenship was not straightforward. In his 2017 memoir, Hit Refresh, Nadella recounts that his wife Anu's visa application was rejected because he held a green card. In June 1994, he gave up his green card at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, reverting to an H-1B so she could join him immediately, GeekWire recounted.

The PERM program took effect only in 2005, replacing an older labor-certification process. But the route — H-1B, employer sponsorship, green card, citizenship — is the one many of Microsoft's foreign-born employees are now on.

Nadella has not commented publicly on the suspension. He did thank Trump on X for the medal, writing that he was "humbled to stand alongside so many giants of American innovation."

What happened at the ceremony?

Trump called Nadella "a key figure in the transformation of Microsoft, revolutionizing the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers from all over the world with some of the most capable software ever built or ever even conceived."

Nadella shared the technology medal with Michael Dell of Dell Technologies. Trump also awarded the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, and Lisa Su.

Of the six honorees, only Dell was born in the U.S. The contrast between honoring immigrant founders and suspending the immigration pipeline that produced them defines the policy's central contradiction — one Microsoft's roughly 3,000 pending-per-year PERM filers will now test in practice.