At a White House briefing with Justice and Labor officials, Vice President JD Vance said the H-1B program was designed to bring in rare talent Americans can’t supply. Instead, big companies gamed it: they would post a job nobody was likely to see, claim no Americans applied, and then bring in cheaper foreign workers and lock them to the company like indentured servants.
American wages get undercut. American workers get shoved aside.
Microsoft was the biggest offender. Vance said it laid off about 6,000 Americans last year while grabbing roughly 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green-card filings — about one and a half foreign replacements for every American let go. “No company abused this system more,” he said.
The administration is now suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the green-card sponsorship program, plus major outsourcing firms — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini — while investigations run. Nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, are under a J-1 visa probe.
Subpoenas are out.
Criminal charges are on the table.
The message was blunt: hire Americans, or get out of the program.
