What PERM Actually Is
On October 8, Vice President JD Vance announced the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program — the federal pipeline employers use to sponsor H-1B workers for green cards — accusing the company of fraud. According to the Associated Press, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling extended the suspension to seven more firms — Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini — and said the Department of Labor will accept no new PERM filings and process no pending ones from any of them.
To understand what that means, untangle the acronyms. The H-1B is a temporary work visa. PERM is the Labor Department certification that a company must obtain before it can sponsor that worker for a green card — it requires proving no qualified American worker is available for the role. Suspending a company from PERM doesn’t cancel existing visas, but it freezes the path from “working here” to “staying here permanently.” For the thousands of workers mid-process at these eight companies, the pipeline just stopped moving.
The Two Sets of Numbers
Vance’s case rests on a striking juxtaposition: Microsoft laid off roughly 6,000 US workers in 2025 while winning approval for more than 6,000 H-1B visas and around 3,000 green cards, and filed 3,682 PERM applications — nearly 1,000 of them for positions overlapping the laid-off jobs. The implication: Americans were cut while foreign workers were slotted into the same roles.
Microsoft’s rebuttal, as TechCrunch reports, reframes every one of those figures: the “vast majority” of its US employees are Americans; of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications last fiscal year, 80% were extensions or status changes for existing workers, not new hires; and new H-1B hires amounted to about 1% of its US workforce. Both sets of numbers can be technically true at once — which is exactly why the fight is about definitions, not arithmetic.
Why This Matters: The 48-Hour Escalation
This didn’t come from nowhere — it came from a 48-hour blitz. On October 7, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $70,000 fee on schools for international students’ OPT work authorization and opened investigations into nine universities. On October 8 came the PERM suspensions — hours before President Trump awarded Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the country’s highest honors for technologists. The administration sanctioned the company and decorated its CEO on the same day.
For tech workers, the practical questions are the ones the breaking-news wave skipped: pending PERM applications at the eight named companies are frozen, not denied — but frozen indefinitely is its own answer. Workers mid-process should talk to immigration counsel now, not when the queue moves. And the precedent matters beyond these eight names: if PERM suspension becomes a standard enforcement tool, every large tech employer’s green-card pipeline is one announcement away from the same freeze.
Meanwhile in Tech News: Microsoft’s other headline this week was hardware — we unpacked the Surface Laptop Ultra’s $2,599 price and the big catch hiding in the fine print.
