Microsoft and Adobe Barred From PERM Route for H-1B Staff

Microsoft and Adobe can no longer use the PERM program, one of the routes their H-1B employees can follow toward a green card. Vice President JD Vance announced the block on a Thursday, saying it stems from alleged fraud and abuse. Six IT outsourcing firms are covered too, and the administration says it will handle no new or pending Permanent Labor Certification applications for any of the companies involved.

Who is affected and what the PERM block means

Besides the two software makers, the suspension lists Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, according to TechRadar. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling put the scope plainly: “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” he said, adding that the measures were taken “due to multiple active federal investigations,”.

PERM is the step in which an employer must demonstrate that hiring a foreign worker permanently will not harm American jobs or wages. It matters most at Microsoft: Labor Department figures cited by TechRadar make the company the largest PERM filer in the country, with more than double the volume of Apple, the next biggest tech filer. The allegations remain unproven, and no lawsuit against either company has been reported.

The numbers Vance used against Microsoft

Vance singled out Microsoft. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more,” the vice president said. He set the company’s layoffs against its visa activity:

Those totals are Vance’s, and no causal link between the job cuts and the approvals has been established beyond his claim. He also accused some employers of writing job advertisements meant to attract nobody, so that the empty applicant pool could justify bringing in foreign staff at lower pay.

For the outsourcers, Sonderling offered collective figures: applications covering almost three million workers, more than 230,000 approved H-1B visas and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications granted.

How Microsoft answered

When Tom’s Hardware first reported the suspension, none of the companies had commented. Microsoft later issued a response; Adobe and the outsourcing firms have not been quoted.

Hours after the announcement, President Trump praised Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Elon Musk, both of whom once held H-1B visas.

Part of a wider visa crackdown

The suspension follows a nationwide Labor Department investigation launched last July into fraud and human trafficking in the H-1B and PERM programs. It targets wage kickbacks, coercion, below-wage labor, recruitment abuse and benching, the practice of keeping an H-1B employee on the books without assigning work or pay. In September, Trump signed an executive order aimed at curbing H-1B abuse, and Cognizant had its green card filings suspended that same month. H-1B lottery rules had reportedly already shifted to favor highly skilled, highly paid candidates.

For scale, the National Foundation for American Policy counted these H-1B approvals among large tech employers in fiscal 2025:

Universities are also in scope. Probes were opened into nine institutions, among them Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown and MIT, over exchange-visitor visas allegedly used to undercut American wages and possible foreign influence in federally funded research. Sarah Spreitzer, a vice president at the American Council on Education, warned: “It could have an enormous economic impact on the whole US economy”.

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