The United States government has announced it will no longer allow a number of tech giants including Microsoft and Indian IT majors to sponsor H1-B visa workers seeking green cards, in a massive blow to thousands of skilled Indian workers seeking tech jobs and permanent resident status in the country.

The announcement, which impacts workers from around the world and not just India, came during a press conference on visa fraud addressed by US vice president J.D. Vance, labour secretary Keith Sonderling and others including US Attorney General Todd Blanche and Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.

“Our message to Microsoft is: you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance, who leads the administration’s anti-fraud task force, said at the press conference, Politico reports.

Vance referred to layoffs announced by Microsoft, while Sonderling said the decision covered Adobe and a handful of major Indian tech companies with operations and employees or partnerships in the United States.

Citing 6,000 layoffs at Microsoft in 2025, Vance said the company added 6,300 H-1B workers and referred to the H1-B programme as “rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades”.

AI-driven job losses, techies in dragnet

A Reuters tracker of job losses due to Artificial Intelligence (AI) said job losses at Microsoft would impact over 2% of its workforce, or 4,800 employees since 2025.

Multiple well-known Indian tech majors in the IT services sector featured among those being suspended from the US’s Permanent Labour Certification Programme (known as PERM) during the same press conference.

“I am hereby suspending from the Permanent Labour Certification Programme some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini,” Sonderling said.

The certificate is the route available to US companies through which they can sponsor foreign workers for green cards. It requires companies to attest that no suitable American candidate is available for the job. The suspension means they will not be able to sponsor green cards.

The restrictions are understood to apply until the US investigates the politically sensitive ‘visa fraud’ allegation that is a political hot potato in election season in the US.

“This announcement today should send and does send a strong signal to every single employer in the United States that the Trump Administration will not tolerate discrimination against American workers,” Blanche said at the press conference.

US President Donald Trump, via an executive order signed on March 16 this year, set up a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud to coordinate a national strategy against “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal benefit programmes.

Vance heads this task force and the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice are part of the initiative, along with scores of enforcement and support teams from government departments.

While the programme was understood to focus on frauds across the board, especially welfare fraud, the attention has lately come to settle on alleged immigration fraud, scanning both the H1-B and J-1 visa programmes.

The latter programme is applicable to US universities accepting international students and software or software service outsourcing firms.

Referring to Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, Sonderling said, “Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost three million foreign workers.”

“They’ve received over 2,30,000 H-1B visa approvals and over 1,00,000 permanent labour certifications,” he said.

He characterised these visas as “jobs that were taken from American workers”.

Foreign workers versus domestic politics

Miller said America under Donald Trump was the “only country in the world” that had managed to turn an immigration system from being “against its people to for its people”

Layoffs by American companies, going by the Reuters tracker of AI-linked job losses, which includes intimations of future sackings by major companies since October 2025, found the highest cuts were in the banking and financial sector and in online marketplaces such as at Amazon, which also is reported to lay off 16,000 employees, as per information until January this year.

HSBC Holdings was expected to reduce its workforce by 10% or about 20,000 workers, the tracker said, and Standard Chartered by over 7,000.

It is unclear if these are layoffs related to their global business networks and or limited to job cuts for staff located in America.

Layoffs are politically sensitive in the United States, especially as they are increasingly linked with the growing ability of Artificial Intelligence to automate tasks performed by humans, which American companies have been quick to both develop and adopt.

News of job cuts has of late sparked emotional stories about American workers being disempowered, such as of the laid-off techie in Colorado who drives a school bus after failing to find other work, and the blame often falls on outsourced foreign employees.

“H-1B is how they get in, and PERM program is how they stay,” Vance said at Thursday’s event.

For the Trump administration, H1-B visas have come to represent workers who, though they may be skilled, find jobs in the US due to seeking lower pay and few perks instead of American workers. As Vance said at Thursday’s press conference, “For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”

On J-1 visas, the US Labour Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito specifically stated at the press conference that the administration was specifically targeting nine top universities including Harvard, Stanford and MIT for allegedly using international PhD candidates and scholars to undercut domestic wages.

This article was originally published in The Wire.