Washington freezes PERM green-card filings for Microsoft, Adobe and six IT firms

The United States Labor Department said on Thursday it will not accept any new permanent labor certification, and will not process any pending one, for Microsoft, Adobe and six large information-technology firms. The freeze covers Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. It is a stop on the PERM step that turns a skilled temporary worker into a green-card applicant. It is not, by itself, a cancellation of visas already in force.

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling gave the aggregate the department is using. Since 2009, he said, these companies had sought almost three million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals, and received more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. He did not break those totals down by firm. Vice President JD Vance, at the same news conference, said no company had abused the system more than Microsoft, and that the suspensions would last as long as they need to. He described a pattern the department says it has found: a firm posts a job advertisement that does not draw applicants, then points to the empty response as the reason it must hire a lower-paid foreign worker.

Microsoft answered with its own numbers. It said that of about 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80 percent were extensions or changes of status for people already on its payroll, not new hires. It said it looks forward to giving the administration more information, and that the vast majority of its United States employees are Americans. The administration's contrast, reported by Reuters, is that Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while drawing 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. In July the company cut a further 4,800 jobs, about 2.1 percent of its global workforce. Reuters also described Microsoft as the largest filer of PERM applications. Those two sets of figures are the argument. One is about the stock of existing employees. The other is about layoffs running alongside new certifications.

The freeze sits on top of a fee the White House already imposed. A proclamation last September put a one-time 100,000 dollar charge on new H-1B petitions for workers hired from abroad. Project Firewall, the department's enforcement drive, has opened about 200 cases and levied millions of dollars in penalties. Thursday's step is different in kind. A fee raises the price of a petition. A refusal to accept PERM filings stops the queue.

Indian outsourcers are four of the eight names. TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies are the firms whose US staffing model is built on H-1B and on the later green-card conversion. A halt on pending as well as new certifications means applications already in the department's pile, for workers who may have been in the country for years, do not move. The department has not said how long the freeze lasts, or whether a firm can exit it by changing a hiring practice. Vance's phrase was as long as it needs to.

The same announcement opened a second front. Nine universities, among them Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are being investigated for misuse of exchange-visitor visas. Subpoenas have been served. Investigators are to look at whether foreign influence, improper financial ties, or visa abuse are affecting federally funded research. The other four universities were not named in the first reports.

Markets in India opened higher on Friday even so. TCS rose about 3.5 percent, to 2,149.10 rupees, which local desks tied to AI-related revenue rather than to any relief on visas. The Labor Department's action does not touch revenue already booked. It touches the pipeline of people those firms can keep. For an engineer in the middle of a PERM case at one of the eight companies, the file is now stuck, and nobody in Thursday's announcement gave a date for when it moves again.