Vice President JD Vance announced today that the Trump administration has suspended Microsoft from the PERM program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers and convert them into U.S. permanent residents.
According to Vance, companies fire American workers and replace them with lower-wage foreigners, describing these workers as “indentured servants.” He specifically accused Microsoft of pink-slipping more than 6,000 employees to bring in additional foreign laborers at reduced wages.
The administration is also investigating the misuse of J-1 visas by universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Stanford. Vance stated that nine universities are under scrutiny for using these visas to undercut wages of American graduate students and researchers.
Vance explained that the PERM program has been “rife with fraud,” noting that companies advertise in small-town newspapers to attract workers but then claim a lack of response to justify replacing American employees. He emphasized that this system allows foreign workers, often earning $20,000 less than U.S. citizens in comparable roles, to become permanent residents.
Microsoft has been identified as the worst offender: it laid off 6,000 American workers while benefiting from nearly 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards over the past year. Vance stated that for every American worker laid off by Microsoft, one and a half foreign workers were brought in.
“This is a pernicious system,” Vance said. “We have allowed this fraud to persist for far too long.”
The administration has suspended Microsoft’s participation in the PERM program, preventing it from converting H-1B visa holders to permanent residents. Federal data shows that over 53,000 petitions for H-1B visas were approved in the past decade alone.
Vance criticized the notion that Americans are incapable of performing jobs typically filled by foreign workers. “When people say we need foreign accountants because there aren’t enough American accountants,” he said, “they’re essentially claiming there aren’t enough people who can do math in the United States.”
