US suspendeds Microsoft and Adobe from green card program as White House presses ‘Americans first’

The White House administration on Thursday suspended tech giant Microsoft from the Permanent Labor Certification Program under which the company was permitted to apply for green cards for its foreign employees citing an alleged fraud.

The company should put “Americans first”, said Vice President JD Vance at a White House briefing.

“Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance said as quoted by media houses.

Vance criticising the company said that no other US firm had ‘abused’ the green card system more than the tech giant. His statement followed allegations against the firm that laid off 6,000 American workers last year while securing 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

The program requires companies advertise jobs in the United States before applying to the Department of Labor for green cards, demonstrating that qualified American workers are unavailable for those positions.

“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 said.

Under the H-1B visa program US firms are allowed to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. In the process the employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. This step is required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.

Other companies that would be from suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. US labor secretary Keith Sonderling said that multiple investigations were being done into the matter.

The secretary also revealed that adobe was also facing the suspension. “Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers,” Sonderling said.

“We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling was quoted as saying.