By ByteBot
The Trump administration dropped a significant immigration bombshell on Thursday: Microsoft, Adobe, and six major Indian IT services firms have been suspended from PERM — the federal program that is the primary pathway for H-1B visa holders to obtain permanent residency. Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the action at a White House briefing, effective immediately, with no stated end date. Tens of thousands of tech workers are now in limbo.
What Just Got Suspended — and Why It Matters
PERM, short for Program Electronic Review Management, is the Department of Labor certification that employers must complete before sponsoring most H-1B workers for a green card via the EB-2 or EB-3 employment-based categories. Without it, there is no standard pathway to permanent residency through your employer.
The eight companies now barred from the program: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. Labor Secretary Sonderling was direct: “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies.” That word pending matters. Workers already mid-process are frozen in place, not just future applicants.
The Numbers Behind the PERM Suspension
The administration’s case rests on scale. Since 2009, these eight firms collectively requested roughly three million foreign workers, received over 230,000 H-1B visa approvals, and obtained more than 100,000 PERM certifications. Vance singled out Microsoft with particular force: the company laid off approximately 6,000 American workers last year while simultaneously employing 6,300 H-1B visa holders and sponsoring nearly 3,000 green cards.
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said. He characterized the arrangement as replacing American workers with “foreign indentured servants” — inflammatory language that will likely invite legal scrutiny. The suspension will remain in place “as long as it needs to,” Vance added. That is a policy statement, not a legal one, and that distinction may matter when the lawsuits arrive.
What the Suspension Does — and Does Not — Do
Worth clarifying the mechanics here, because headlines are causing understandable confusion. The suspension does not cancel existing H-1B visas. It does not automatically invalidate already-approved PERM cases or I-140 immigrant petitions. What it does: it stops these companies from initiating new PERM sponsorships, and it freezes applications already in the pipeline awaiting Department of Labor processing.
If your I-140 has already been approved and you are waiting on a priority date, your immediate situation has not technically changed. However, consulting an immigration attorney is no longer optional — the legal uncertainty here is real and the stakes are high. According to CNBC’s coverage, the Department of Labor has not disclosed how many pending applications are affected or how long the suspension will last.
Options for Workers Caught in the Middle
If you work at one of these eight companies and were counting on PERM sponsorship, several alternative paths are worth exploring now. These are not easy routes, but they exist. VisaVerge’s breakdown of the suspension covers the immediate implications in detail.
- EB-1A (Extraordinary Ability): No PERM required, self-petition. Requires demonstrating sustained national or international acclaim in your field — publications, patents, speaking history, significant contributions. The high bar is real, but EB-1 India backlogs are dramatically shorter than EB-2. If you have the evidence, this route is worth a serious look.
- EB-2 National Interest Waiver (NIW): Another self-petition option that skips the PERM requirement entirely. Designed for advanced-degree professionals whose work has substantial merit and national importance. Tech workers, engineers, and researchers have increasingly succeeded with NIW petitions.
- AC21 portability: If your PERM or I-140 has been pending for 365 or more days, the AC21 statute allows you to change employers without losing your priority date. Moving to a company not under suspension could allow you to keep your place in line while resuming normal sponsorship.
- Change employers: Companies not named in this suspension can still file PERM applications as normal. If your situation permits, moving to a non-suspended employer may be the most direct option.
For a comprehensive overview of PERM alternatives, Manifest Law’s H-1B alternatives guide covers these and other pathways in practical detail.
A Suspension That Bundles Two Different Problems
There is a legitimate critique buried in this announcement, and a more questionable one bundled alongside it. The six Indian IT services firms — Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini — have faced longstanding bipartisan criticism for a staffing model that relies heavily on H-1B workers, sometimes in ways that affect local labor markets and wage levels. That critique has real substance and a long history.
Microsoft and Adobe are a different story. These are product companies that use H-1B to recruit global engineering talent for specific technical roles, not to staff client sites at scale. Bundling them with IT staffing giants in the same suspension either reflects intentional political signaling or a blunt enforcement instrument applied too broadly. As Newsweek noted, the two categories of companies operate under fundamentally different business models.
Either way, the engineers, developers, and data scientists caught in the middle did not design the system they are now being punished for using legally. This suspension is indefinite, affects real careers and lives, and — given the scale of the companies involved — it is almost certain to face legal challenges before it is resolved.
