Vance: Microsoft Suspended From Foreign Worker Green Card Program

By Emel Akan
Emel Akan
Emel Akan
Senior Reporter
Emel Akan is a senior White House correspondent for The Epoch Times, where she covers the policies of the Trump administration. Previously, she reported on the Biden administration and President Donald Trump's first term. Before her journalism career, she worked in investment banking at JPMorgan.
and Travis Gillmore
Travis Gillmore
Travis Gillmore
Travis Gillmore is a White House reporter for The Epoch Times. He previously covered the California legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Contact him at Travis.gillmore@epochtimesca.com
October 8, 2026Updated: October 8, 2026

WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance has announced that the Trump administration will suspend Microsoft from a program that allows its foreign workers to apply for green cards, citing alleged fraud.

“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said in a press conference on Oct. 8.

“Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 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.”

Speaking at the press conference, Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said that other IT service companies would also be suspended from ​the Permanent Labor Certification Program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini.

Anthony D’Esposito, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Labor, also announced that the Trump administration is launching an “investigation into the J-1 visa fraud involving nine major American universities.”

The universities involved are Pitt, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the company HCL. The Epoch Times regrets the error.