White House pauses PERM approvals over alleged H1B visa fraud

PERM, short for the Permanent Labor Certification Program, is how most employers start sponsoring a foreign worker for an employment-based green card. The company has to show the Labor Department that hiring the worker permanently will not hurt wages or job opportunities for Americans. Many PERM applicants are already in the US on H-1B visas, which let companies hire skilled foreign workers for specialized roles and are capped at 85,000 a year.

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the block at a White House news conference on a Thursday in early October, alongside Vice President JD Vance. Sonderling said the department will not accept any new applications or process any pending ones involving the named companies, and tied the suspensions to multiple active federal investigations. Vance said the freeze would last as long as needed.

Eight companies were named in total. Two are US software giants, Microsoft and Adobe. The other six are large IT outsourcing firms that place workers at other businesses: Infosys, HCL Technologies, Capgemini, Wipro, Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services.

Sonderling said that since 2009 these companies together have requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and won more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications.

Missing from the list were Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and Nvidia, which also hire through the H-1B program and were not mentioned. Vance also named nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT, for investigation over alleged misuse of J-1 exchange visitor visas.

Vance aimed most of his fire at Microsoft. He said the company laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards, and called the foreign hires indentured servants, a term he linked to the fact that H-1B workers who lose their jobs must leave the country. They typically get a 60-day grace period, which the government proposed scrapping last month.

Microsoft pushed back. It said about 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of people already working there, not to hire new staff, and that it pays H-1B employees the same as others doing similar work. A spokeswoman added that the vast majority of its US employees are Americans. Microsoft employs more than 200,000 people worldwide.

The timing was awkward. The same day, President Donald Trump presented Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with a new White House medal for technology innovation.

If you hold an H-1B at one of the eight companies, your visa is still valid. India’s Ministry of External Affairs, whose citizens make up a large share of workers at the outsourcing firms, stressed that the PERM freeze does not by itself affect H-1B validity or the status of visa holders and their families. It did warn of a possible impact on green card plans.

That impact is the real cost. Pending applications are frozen along with new ones, so workers already in line lose time. For people from countries with long green card backlogs, even a few months of delay can push back the date they can switch employers freely or settle permanently. There is an irony here: a green card frees a worker from depending on one employer, so blocking it keeps workers tied to the very companies being accused.

Practical steps if you are affected:

• Ask your employer’s immigration team where your PERM case stands and whether it was pending on the freeze date.
• Check your H-1B end date and extension options, since your green card timeline may slip.
• Talk to an immigration attorney before changing jobs, as moving employers can restart parts of the process.
• If you are weighing an offer from one of these firms, ask how they plan to handle sponsorship while the freeze lasts.

The PERM freeze follows a string of moves. A $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, set by presidential proclamation, was struck down by a federal judge in June. The administration then proposed a $103,265 fee in August, which is not yet final. The Department of Homeland Security has also proposed a $70,000 fee for schools on each student in the Optional Practical Training program, which lets international graduates work in the US.

Opinion is split. Howard University professor Ron Hira, a longtime H-1B critic, called the move very significant. Doug Rand, a former senior adviser at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, argued that blocking green cards makes workers more dependent on employers, not less. The administration has not said when the investigations will end.