Why Microsoft Was Suspended From the PERM Green Card Program
On 8 October 2026 the Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcing firms from PERM, the labor certification behind most employer-sponsored green cards. New and pending applications from them are frozen. Vice President JD Vance alleged visa abuse; Microsoft defended its hiring.
The announced action covers PERM labor certifications, not H-1B visas themselves. It stops one paperwork step, the Labor Department’s sign-off that an employer could not find a qualified American for a job, for eight named employers, and that step comes before most employer-sponsored green cards. Below are the facts as both sides stated them, the official H-1B record for Microsoft, and what is still unknown.
What was announced on 8 October 2026
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling named the eight employers at a White House news conference of the fraud task force that Vice President JD Vance leads: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. In his words, the department will “not accept any new or process any pending” permanent labor certification applications involving them.
Vance said the pause would last “as long as it needs to,” and Manifest Law noted that no end date was set. Bloomberg Law described the suspensions as indefinite.
The same event announced investigations into J-1 exchange-visitor use at nine universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT. The Labor Department’s inspector general said subpoenas had already been served.
The same day, President Trump was set to honor Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Both Sinclair’s national desk and Bloomberg Law reported the ceremony on 8 October.
How it works: from H-1B to a green card
The H-1B is a temporary, nonimmigrant status. It lets a US employer hire a foreign worker for a specialized, high-skill job. A green card is permanent residence, and for most workers sponsored by an employer it starts with PERM.
PERM is the labor test. The employer tests the job market, and the Labor Department must certify that qualified US workers were not available for the role. WR Immigration describes the step that way, Vance described the same certification when asked what made the conduct fraudulent, and the Sinclair report calls PERM an employer’s first step in sponsoring an employment-based green card.
Then USCIS takes over. Once the Labor Department certifies the job, the employer files Form I-140, the immigrant petition, with US Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS says third-preference petitions usually arrive with the approved Form ETA-9089 attached. A frozen PERM step therefore stops everything after it.
The suspension power already exists. Under 20 CFR 656.31(b), the Labor Department may suspend processing for an employer under investigation for possible fraud or willful misrepresentation. A first suspension can last up to 180 days and can then be extended until the investigation or court case ends. WR Immigration points to this same rule, while noting that the written notices should confirm which authority was actually used.
What each side says
The administration’s case. Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. “You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” he told Microsoft. The administration’s allegation, as Sinclair and KOMO reported it, is that certifying no American was available is false when a company uses the program to replace US workers with lower-paid foreign ones.
Sonderling added a figure for all eight firms together: since 2009 they asked for almost 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. None of the reports we read included the records behind those totals.
Microsoft’s answer. In a statement the same day, carried in full by KOMO and quoted by Fox Business and Spectrum News, Microsoft said that of about 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of people already working there.
The rest, it said, were people already legally in the US, equal to 1% of its US workforce. It said it pays H-1B staff the same as others doing comparable work and looks forward to giving the administration more information.
The dispute is not new. In July 2025, after about 9,000 job cuts, Microsoft told CFO Dive that its H-1B filings were “in no way related” to the layoffs, partly because H-1B employees lost roles too, and that 78% of its petitions in the prior 12 months were extensions for existing staff. Newsweek and American Bazaar carried the same statement.
The two sets of numbers measure different things. Vance’s figures mix layoffs with visas and green cards over “last year”. Microsoft’s describe filings in its fiscal year. None of the reports we read included the underlying records for either set.
The original data
Vance’s three numbers are spoken claims, so the first chart is labeled as his, not as a count.
There is an official record to set beside the H-1B part of it. USCIS publishes approvals for every employer in its H-1B Employer Data Hub, split into initial approvals (new employment, including new concurrent employment) and continuing approvals, which USCIS defines as every other petition type, for example continuing employment, a change of employer and amended petitions. A worker moving to Microsoft from another H-1B employer therefore counts as continuing.
We downloaded every annual file from fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2023 and added up the rows under the Microsoft Corporation name (two misspelled rows included; separate units such as Microsoft Licensing GP left out).
From fiscal 2009 through fiscal 2022, USCIS recorded 62,065 H-1B approvals for Microsoft: 18,907 initial and 43,158 continuing, so 69.54% were continuing. The yearly total ran from 2,827 in fiscal 2015 to 7,210 in fiscal 2022. In fiscal 2022, 6,202 of the 7,210 were continuing approvals, a share of 86.02%, against 70.32% for every employer in the file that year.
Microsoft’s continuing share was above the all-employer share in 9 of the 14 years; its lowest was 47.15% in fiscal 2010.
Read fairly, the official record is consistent with the direction of Microsoft’s statement, since most of its approvals have been for people already in H-1B status. It cannot confirm the 80% figure, because USCIS’s continuing category also counts workers joining from other employers, so it is not the same as Microsoft’s “extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees” wording and the archive ends before fiscal 2025. It also says nothing about layoffs or green cards, so it neither proves nor disproves Vance’s figures.
The last chart is the market’s first reaction, from Yahoo Finance daily closes on 7 and 8 October 2026. Microsoft closed at $522.61, down 1.35% from $529.76, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 1.25% and the S&P 500 0.47%. Two of the other suspended companies rose: Adobe by 3.56% and Cognizant by 5.15%.
A worked example: one worker, one pending case
Take a hypothetical software engineer on an H-1B at one of the eight firms whose PERM application was filed in August 2026 and was still waiting on 8 October.
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The application stops. Sonderling said pending applications involving these companies will not be processed, so the case sits where it was.
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The next step cannot start. The I-140 petition to USCIS normally needs the certified ETA-9089, so there is nothing to file yet.
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The H-1B itself is a separate track. The announcement named labor certifications, not H-1B status. Whether the freeze touches any other filing for this worker is a question for the written notices and for the worker’s own lawyer.
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The wait has no announced end. How long it lasts depends on the investigations and on the Labor Department’s written notices, which had not been published when the specialist firms wrote their alerts on 8 October.
The company side of the same example: an employer under suspension cannot move any green card case through the Labor Department for its staff until processing resumes.
What it means for you
If you work at one of the eight companies on a visa, your green card case may be on hold for an unknown time. Read every notice your employer’s immigration team sends, keep copies of your approvals, and take questions to an immigration lawyer rather than to forums.
If you are an American tech worker, the administration says the goal is to protect jobs like yours. Whether these companies hire more people in the US, hire abroad or change little is not known yet, and no one has published a count that would show it.
If you hold Microsoft or the other companies in a fund, the first day’s move was about the size of the Nasdaq’s. One day of prices says little about a business.
For everyone, it is a reminder that a job can change because of a rule made far away. A written monthly budget and an emergency fund are what turn a surprise at work into an inconvenience instead of a crisis.
When it fails: what is not known yet
Several things could change this story, and none of them is settled as of 10 October 2026.
The legal basis has not been published. Manifest Law reported that officials had not released written details or the authority behind the suspensions, and WR Immigration advised waiting for the Labor Department’s written notices before assuming how long they last. If the 180-day rule is the one used, the first review point would fall in early April 2027, but that is an inference from the regulation, not an announced date.
Allegations are not findings. The officials cited investigations. WR Immigration stressed that the announcement does not establish the outcome of any of them. Microsoft has said it will give the administration more information, so its side of the record is not yet complete either.
The numbers are untested. Vance’s 6,000, 6,300 and nearly 3,000, Sonderling’s totals and Microsoft’s 80% all came without the underlying records. The USCIS file above covers H-1B approvals only and stops in fiscal 2023. WR Immigration also listed administrative or court challenges among the next developments to watch, and any of them could change the timeline.
One more limit of our own data. USCIS records approvals by the fiscal year of the decision, under the name on the petition, so a petition filed in one year and decided in the next counts in the later year, and filings under a differently spelled company name are missed.
Related
If a work surprise is your worry, start with budgeting, which builds the one monthly number everything else depends on, then size an emergency fund from it. If a job change also leaves a retirement balance behind at an old employer, the rollover page explains how to move it without a tax bill.
If your green card case runs through one of these employers, get your own case read by an immigration lawyer before you change jobs, travel or sign anything. Keep copies of every approval notice you already hold.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.