President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas as it accuses the company of fraud.
Supporters of the Republican president have long argued that various programs like the one Vice President JD Vance accused Microsoft of abusing essentially empower American companies to recruit foreign workers for jobs that end up undercutting Americans. In a wide-ranging announcement Thursday, 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.
The announcement came hours before Trump was scheduled to award the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, part of an event at which he is granting some of the nation’s most prestigious science and technology awards to his tech billionaire allies.
Vance says U.S. workers are replaced with ‘foreign indentured servants’
Vance said that 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.
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“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. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, near Seattle, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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 job, they have to leave the country, and they earn less than Americans in the same position.
H-1B program has been scrutinized
The H-1B program has long been a target of Trump supporters who say that the program undercuts American workers and is rife with abuse.
H-1B visas are meant for high-skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. Technology companies are the biggest users, with nearly three-quarters of approvals going to workers from India.
Trump also has targeted foreign students
The Vance announcement came a day after Trump’s administration launched another broadside against international students and their ability to work in the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practical Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.
Vance also called out universities that he suggested were abusing a program to allow international students to come to the U.S. These temporary visas, called J-1 visas, allow international visitors to temporarily come to the U.S. for work and study exchange programs. Vance singled out nine universities that he said merited further investigation for J-1 visa fraud, saying they used the program in greater proportions than their counterparts.
The universities were Harvard; Yale; Stanford; Brown; the University of Pittsburgh; the University of California, Davis; the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech; Arizona State; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. The universities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
