Several major US corporations were recently suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program as the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud proceeds with investigating H-1B abuse.
The US Department of Labor (DOL), alongside the Task Force, announced that Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, and four other major H-1B employers were suspended from the program and accused these companies of running “visa mills” to import cheap foreign labor en masse. The suspended companies are also subject to ongoing investigations, probing the use of “ghost jobs” and other tactics to circumvent federal law.
Vice President JD Vance held a press conference addressing H-1B and J-1 visa fraud. He stated that “there has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft … Our message to Microsoft is, you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”
Vance claimed the PERM suspensions were not meant to harm these companies, but to change their behavior, while Attorney General Todd Blanche warned that there would be criminal cases brought against them if they were found to have broken US laws. Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito announced an investigation into nine major universities for J-1 visa fraud, including Yale, Harvard, and Stanford.
The PERM program is a pathway used to transition foreign employees from the H-1B visa to permanent employment-based green cards. Employers need this visa pathway because the H-1B visa ends at 6 years, at which point they must acquire green cards for their H-1Bs, or else be forced to bring in new H-1B hires.
Microsoft specifically came under fire earlier this year after XBOX purged over 4,8000 workers in a massive round of layoffs, while Microsoft remained the nation’s top H-1B employer. JD Vance totaled the number of American workers replaced by H-1Bs by Microsoft alone at 6,000 and nationwide in the hundreds of thousands.
Texans for Strong Borders supports efforts by the administration to hold employers accountable for visa fraud and bring national attention to the troubles facing American workers. Suspending companies from PERM puts pressure on them to stop using cheap foreign labor, but this is only a temporary mitigation.
Employers will seek to find other loopholes or outlast the administration, then go right back to their corrupt practices.
The rampant abuse and fraud in H-1B, J-1, and other visa programs can only be solved by abolishing these programs entirely. Employers cannot be trusted to self-police and avoid the cheap foreign labor pipeline when the system is full of opportunities to capitalize at the expense of the nation. The Trump administration is correct to admonish these companies for their fraudulent practices, but these pleas will fall on deaf ears.