The Trump administration's reasoning for the suspension of the Microsoft's access to green cards for its H-1B visa holders was "off base," the company's president said on Wednesday. Speaking to Politico in Ireland, Brad Smith denied Vice President JD Vance's accusations last week that Microsoft was engaging in widespread fraud through the so-called PERM (program electronic review management) process, because the company laid off thousands of workers while also applying for green cards. "What was presented, as Microsoft replacing 6,000 people who lost their jobs with 9,000 foreigners, was, frankly, completely off base," Smith said.
"The vast majority of both the visa applications and green card applications were not for new employees but for people who had already been working at Microsoft." Smith said many of those seeking green cards had been with Microsoft for many years, but the backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was so long that it took time. Microsoft told Newsweek on Thursday that it had nothing to add.
Newsweek also reached out to the White House for comment. During an October 8 press conference framed around fighting visa fraud, Vance and other senior officials, including Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling and Attorney General Todd Blanche, laid out a ban on multiple tech companies being allowed to apply for permanent residency for their H-1B workers. Vance focused on Microsoft, saying that the Trump administration supported the company but had major concerns about its PERM program usage.
"So, in the last year, Microsoft—and I want to be clear about the data here…Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers," Vance said during the press conference. "At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. "In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replace that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants." Officials said investigations were being launched into Microsoft and Adobe's involvement in the green card process, while IT companies Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini were also suspended.
"I think the primary impact of the administration's action will be to encourage more companies to expand their investments and hiring outside the U.S., particularly for research and development, to avoid being targeted," Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, told Newsweek following the announcement. "That will harm U.S. workers far more than anything alleged at the press conference. "There was no recognition at the press conference that up to 80 percent of full-time graduate students at U.S. universities in AI-related fields, such as computer and information sciences, are international students or that 59 percent of U.S. billion-dollar startup companies have at least one immigrant founder.
If companies hired no recent international students or others because they weren't born here, as appears to be the policy recommended at the press event, it is unlikely America would fare well economically or technologically.” Speaking Wednesday, Smith said the public had been left with the sense the only people Microsoft hired last year were from outside the U.S. "We hired 9,200 American workers in our last fiscal year, and that was left out of the narrative," he told Politico. "We will stand by our record, and I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture." Smith said he had concerns about the potential impact of the Trump administration's ban on U.S. ability to attract top talent—the main reason for the H-1B visa.
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