U.S. Suspends PERM Eligibility for Eight Tech Companies Including Microsoft and Adobe, Drawing Mixed Reactions
nashnova research
The Trump administration suspended PERM green-card certification for Microsoft, Adobe and six major Indian IT outsourcers, blocking the main pathway for H-1B workers to obtain permanent residency; reactions from industry, experts and India are sharply divided.
What exactly happened with PERM?
PERM — permanent labor certification, a Department of Labor approval employers must obtain before sponsoring a foreign worker for an employment-based green card — has been suspended for eight companies: Microsoft, Adobe, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Cognizant and Capgemini.
This means → these companies cannot initiate green-card applications for H-1B staff through the PERM channel, effectively sealing off the main retention pathway.
Vice President JD Vance singled out Microsoft: "For every employee Microsoft lays off, it replaces them with roughly one and a half foreign 'indentured workers.'" The framing casts the move as protecting American workers.
How did Microsoft respond — and what do the numbers say?
Microsoft stated that of the roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions it filed last fiscal year, 80% were renewals or status changes for existing employees, not new hires. In plain terms = Microsoft is saying "we're keeping people we already employ, not displacing Americans."
On the same day, the White House awarded Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation — sanctioning and honoring the same company in the same news cycle sends a contradictory signal.
TCS said its PERM filings over the past two years were in the single digits and reaffirmed plans to hire 15,000 people in the US over five years; the other Indian firms have not yet commented.
Experts are split — who is actually protected?
Howard University professor Ron Hira, a long-time H-1B critic, called the action "significant." He told the AP that PERM was supposed to require employers to prove foreign hires do not harm comparable US workers — "but that provision has never been enforced."
Former USCIS senior advisor Doug Rand took the opposite view: H-1B status ties a worker tightly to their employer; a green card is what grants the freedom to switch jobs and negotiate pay. Blocking the green-card pathway deepens the "indentured worker" problem, not solves it.
This reflects a core contradiction: if the goal is to reduce exploitation of foreign workers, cutting off their path to permanent residency does exactly the opposite.
What does this mean for India — less money in, but more work staying?
The direct hit: fewer high-earning Indians in the US → pressure on remittance flows. India receives roughly $125 billion in annual remittances; about a quarter comes from the US.
But Dinesh Pai, VP of investments at India's largest brokerage Zerodha, also sees an upside: if US companies cannot bring talent in, "they may bring the work to India instead"; visa uncertainty could also keep more top engineers building startups on Indian soil.
Industry body Nasscom stressed that the number of workers moving from H-1B to permanent residency via PERM is "relatively limited" and that immigration policy should not be conflated with technology talent mobility.
What to watch next?
Whether affected companies' negotiations with the government can produce any policy softening is the biggest near-term variable.
Over the longer term, the real P&L impact hinges on whether rising onshore labor costs can be offset by shifting more work to offshore delivery.
In plain terms = can the policy be walked back, and can the work be moved out — those two threads determine whether this is short-term noise or a structural inflection.
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