What smart people are saying about the US suspending new PERM applications for Microsoft, Adobe, and Indian tech giants

For foreign workers at some of the biggest employers in tech, there's another twist in an already uncertain system.

On Thursday morning, Vice President JD Vance announced the suspension at a press conference. He singled out Microsoft, saying: "If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."

PERM is not itself a visa. It is the Labor Department certification employers generally need before sponsoring a worker for an employment-based green card. Vance said that some companies had abused the system and used foreign workers to undercut Americans.

"Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people," the company wrote.

Here’s what immigration-policy experts and Indian tech voices are saying:

Hira, a Howard University political science professor and a longtime critic of the H-1B program, called the move against Microsoft “very significant.”

Doug Rand, former senior advisor at US Citizenship and Immigration Services

Rand, a former senior advisor at US Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, took the opposite view. He called Vance’s announcement “incoherent” in a statement to AP.

“If the Trump administration were truly concerned that H-1B workers are ‘indentured servants,’ then the last thing they would do is block companies from helping their own H-1B workers get green cards,” Rand told AP.

Pai, an India-based vice president of investments at the country's largest brokerage Zerodha, reacted to what a more restrictive US path to permanent residency could mean for India.

But he also saw a potential upside. If US companies cannot bring talent to America, he wrote, “they probably will bring the work to India.”

Nasscom, India's main tech industry group, said immigration policy and skilled-talent mobility should be treated as separate issues.