Trump Just Suspended Microsoft From a Green Card Program. The Bigger Target is Tech Hiring

On Thursday, the Trump Administration announced it was suspending eight companies, including Microsoft, Adobe and six IT services firms from a program that allows foreign workers to apply for green cards, according to a report in Politico. 

The administration has long argued various programs such as the H-1B visas, which is what JD Vance accused Microsoft of abusing. Advocates of these initiatives though say they are good for attracting some of the best talent from abroad and help fill important hiring gaps. 

H-1B visas are given out to employees that hold high-skilled jobs that companies have difficulties filling with American workers. Tech companies are its biggest users with Microsoft at number five and Amazon at number one, according to data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

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But Vance disagrees. “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” he said during the announcement. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”

Vance continued by explaining that Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year but got approval for 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. 

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”