The Labor Department has stopped processing PERM applications from eight companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced it on October 8 at a White House fraud task force event, per Newsweek. Pending applications from those companies will not move forward, and new ones will not be accepted.
The suspension covers PERM, the labor certification an employer needs before it can sponsor many workers for a green card. It does not cancel H-1B visas. It is an administrative action, with no rule proposed. Sonderling tied the Microsoft and Adobe suspensions to "multiple active federal investigations." The announcement gave no legal basis, no duration, and no count of affected applications.
The people affected are employees already in the United States. An H-1B visa has a six-year limit, and PERM is the usual step that lets a worker stay past it. Labor Department data show 3,157 PERM filings by Microsoft. The Cato Institute's David Bier argues the department cannot lawfully suspend a company it has not shown broke the rules. He warned that workers may have to leave when their visas expire.
Microsoft said it pays H-1B employees the same as others doing comparable work, and that 80% of its H-1B filings last fiscal year were for existing employees, per Citi Newsroom. Vance said the administration wants the companies to hire American workers and called on Congress to rework the H-1B program. No lawsuit has been reported so far.
Bottom Line
Eight employers lost access to the green card pipeline by announcement, with no end date. If you manage engineers on H-1B visas at an affected company, map whose six-year limit falls inside the next year, because those people have a deadline. If you hire from the same talent pool, expect candidates to ask whether your PERM filings are moving.