Trump Admin Bans Microsoft From H-1B-to-Permanent Resident Program. Vance: Foreign Work Visa Fraud Must Stop
Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration has suspended Microsoft from the anti-American worker program that permits big companies to get permanent residency for foreign employees.
The companies fire Americans and hire foreigners for lower wages, Vance said. Calling the foreigners “indentured servants,” he accused Microsoft of pink-slipping more than 6,000 employees to bring in even more lower-wage foreigners.
Vance also said the administration is investigating the abuse of J-1 visas by universities.
The Suspension
The PERM program permits unscrupulous American companies to import H-1B visa workers, then get them permanent residency. That not only cheats Americans out of jobs, but also permits the foreigners to establish a beachhead here. Then they can drop anchor babies who are U.S. citizens.
Vance didn’t mention that problem, however, at today’s news conference.
Noting that the program is “rife with fraud,” Vance said companies advertise in a “small-town newspaper,” then “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 a response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance continued.
Microsoft is the worst offender in abusing the PERM program, he said:
Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. 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 replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants. Now, that is a scandalous system that we’ve allowed in this country for far too long.
Vance said the administration would stop the fraud.
“Thanks to an ongoing investigation, we have decided to suspend the PERM program for Microsoft, which means they will no longer be able to take those H-1Bs and apply for permanent resident status within the United States of America,” Vance said.
Vance explained that H-1B visa workers, like the indentured servants of yore, are “mistreated.” They are at the mercy of the employer and will be kicked out of the country if they lose a job.
“Indentured Servants”
Vance elaborated on the data, calling the fraud “pernicious” and saying the workers shouldn’t be in the United States. The greedy companies pay the foreign workers nearly $50,000 annually less than Americans in some cases, savings that enrich the companies at the expense of the employees.
“If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position,” Vance observed:
If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position. So I’m sure that everybody here understands the game that is being played. You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers, and if you’re a corporation, you make a ton of money by undercutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who frankly shouldn’t be in the United States of America to begin with.
Vance said the chicanery is a “terribly pernicious system” that’s “gone on for too long.” Congress must “do something about” it, but the administration has the regulatory authority to attack the problem now.
MS: 53K Petitions in 10 Years, Americans Can Do the Jobs, J-1 Fraud
Citing federal numbers, The Washington Post explained how big a problem Microsoft is.
The government has approved about 3,700 H-1B workers in fiscal 2026 “through June 30 and has had more than 53,000 petitions approved over the past decade,” the newspaper reported. While Microsoft can still get H-1B visa workers, suspension from PERM, the newspaper reported, will make the company “a less lucrative destination for workers who hope to obtain permanent residency.”
Yet the assumption built into the visa fraud, and the program, is that Americans are too stupid, too lazy, or both to work for the participating companies. That is a lie, Vance said.
“There’s this pernicious idea … that Americans are not good enough for the jobs in their own country,” Vance said:
You hear people say that in subtle ways and sometimes explicit ways. When people say that Americans won’t work on farms or they won’t work in certain dirty jobs, what they’re really saying is that Americans won’t work in those jobs for poverty wages, nor should they. When you hear people say that we have to bring in foreign accountants because there aren’t enough American accountants, what they’re saying is that there aren’t enough people who can do math in the United States of America, which is absurd. When people say we need to bring in foreign IT specialists and quite literally force people to train their own replacements, what we’re saying is that there are Americans who cannot do those jobs. And that is absurd. To the American people, this visa fraud is a frontal assault on the idea that you deserve to inherit the jobs and the positions in your own country. Never believe the lie that Americans are not good enough to build a future for Americans. That’s what visa fraud tells us. It is a lie.
Vance also explained that elite universities use J-1 student visas to undercut wages of Americans. Vance said nine universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Stanford, must be investigated. American grad students and researchers earn $20,000 more than J-1 visa holders.
“They’re using these visas way too much,” he said:
They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.
