US blocks Microsoft and other firms from sponsoring green cards under a labour programme

The US government has moved to block Microsoft and several other major employers from a programme used to sponsor skilled foreign workers for permanent residency. Al Jazeera and the BBC both report that Vice President JD Vance announced the step at a White House news conference on Thursday.

The programme is the Permanent Labor Certification Program, known as PERM. It is a key step in getting a green card for many skilled foreign workers, and employers must show that bringing in a foreign worker will not harm the pay or conditions of US workers. The BBC says Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling told the same conference that the government will not process any new or pending PERM applications from Microsoft or seven other companies.

The BBC lists those companies as Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini alongside Microsoft. Mr Vance accused them of fraud and said they were effectively replacing American workers with foreign workers he called indentured servants. He said Microsoft had laid off about 6,000 workers while filing 6,800 H-1B visa applications over the same period. These are the vice president’s claims and the BBC says the White House has often made extreme claims on immigration.

Microsoft disputes the picture. A spokeswoman told the BBC that 80 percent of its H-1B filings over the last fiscal year were for employees already working at the company, and that workers hired this way are paid the same as US workers. She also said most of Microsoft’s US employees are American. The BBC said it had contacted the other companies for comment.

Al Jazeera says the move could affect thousands of foreign workers, many of whom have waited years for a backlog of applications to clear. It places the step within the Trump administration’s wider efforts to limit both legal and illegal immigration.

The government has not published evidence for the fraud claim in the reports we read.