Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and several tech recruiting companies from a program that lets H-1B visa holders apply for green cards, citing what officials call widespread abuses of the visa system.
Vance’s antifraud task force took the action the same day President Trump recognized Microsoft’s CEO and other tech leaders at a Washington event. Vance said no other company has abused the system more than Microsoft, accusing it of laying off U.S. citizens and replacing them with foreign workers on H-1B visas.
“For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants,” he said, calling the practice part of a “scandalous system that we’ve allowed in this country for far too long.”
A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company plans to give the administration more information. Most of its U.S. employees are American citizens, she said, and of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80% were for existing employees.
Adobe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Congress created the H-1B program in 1990 as the main route into the United States for highly skilled foreign workers. Visa holders can later become eligible for green cards that allow them to stay indefinitely. The program has drawn growing criticism from Republicans as the Trump administration presses companies to hire Americans. Critics say firms are not required to show that no qualified Americans are available before hiring a foreign professional on an H-1B.