For decades, everyone in tech has known that Microsoft was abusing the H1-B visa system to illegally import low-wage foreigners (mainly Indians) to do their programming rather than pay American programmers prevailing wages. The Trump Administration is finally doing something about it.
President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday it was suspending Microsoft and several other firms from a program allowing foreign workers to apply for green cards, as it also lashed out at universities that bring international students to the U.S. on exchange programs.
The announcement by Vice President JD Vance marks the latest swing from the Trump administration at employers and universities that welcome foreign students and workers into the country.
Funny how the Trump Administration assigns tasks to Vance when they want to Get Stuff Done, while President Autopen assigned Kamala Harris to tasks where they didn’t want her to do anything.
Supporters of the Republican president have long argued that various programs like H-1B visas — which Vance accused Microsoft of abusing — essentially empower American companies to recruit foreign workers for jobs that end up undercutting Americans. In the wide-ranging announcement, Vance and other top administration officials also called out universities over their use of J-1 visas for international students and information technology outsourcing firms.
Snip.
Vance says US workers are replaced with ‘foreign indentured servants’
Vance said the program from which Microsoft is being suspended requires companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labor to show they need to give a foreign worker a green card because of a lack of American workers.
“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,” Vance said.
The tech employment market is also plagued with “ghost jobs,” where the same companies keep reposting same jobs over and over again without hiring anyone. I’m not sure if this is linked to H1-B visa abuse, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
Microsoft is No. 5 among U.S. employers when it comes to using H-1B visas, according data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon is No. 1.
Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 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 in a White House news conference announcing the decision. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”
Vance said H-1B workers are effectively foreign indentured servants because if they lose their jobs, they have to leave the country, and they earn less than Americans in the same position.
Snip.
Ron Hira, a Howard University political science professor and longtime critic of the H-1B program, called the move against Microsoft “very significant.’’ Hira noted the White House last month issued a little-noticed executive order directing government agencies to “implement appropriate measures to protect American workers from abuse of the H-1B program and ensure that the program serves the national interest.’’
“There are supposed to be protections for U.S. workers that say: If you hire an H-1B, you are promising that you are not adversely affecting similarly employed U.S. workers,’’ Hira said. “That’s never been enforced.’’
Besides Microsoft, Vance said the government was similarly suspending Adobe and tech consulting firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. The companies did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Cognizant is the company hiring more H1-B visa employees in Texas than Tesla, Oracle, Schwab, AT&T and HPE combined. Tata is a temporary/contract employment firm literally based in India. I don’t know about Adobe’s employment practices, but I do know they’re the ones who wanted unlimited use of everything you ever created with their tools. I’d say the Department of Labor is over the right targets.
Microsoft has been an abusive company for a long, long time, and their reckoning is overdue.