The U.S. Department of Labor announced it would suspend Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program on Thursday, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said, as the Trump administration continues to take aim at immigration and foreign hiring programs ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Sonderling said the Labor Department won’t accept or process any new applications under the program for a host of companies, including Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL.
The secretary said Adobe and Microsoft were also suspended “due to multiple active federal investigations.”
“Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers,” Sonderling said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/microsoft-adobe-green-card-labor-suspension.html
That’s not how that works. If they wanted to take those jobs from Americans, they’d just open an office in that country… and probably save a lot of money doing so.
Americans either didn’t want or didn’t qualify for these jobs, no employer goes through the visa process to stick it to Americans, it’s a giant pain in the ass.
Americans didn’t want those jobs at the salary they were offering. That’s the kicker.
The visa process may be a pain. But with a company like Tata to help you with it or do it for you, you can end up paying that H1B worker MUCH less than you would an American. And because their H1B is tied to their employment they won’t rock the boat because getting fired means having to leave the USA.
Exactly this. These fucking companies use H1B’s to hire 40k workers for 80k jobs…the problem is, they end up getting 40K workers trying to do jobs they’re largely not qualified to do, but since we have no real way of vetting them, they come in with a ‘fake it until you make it’ mentality…
This is a fun little fault line, because leftists can take both sides. They can be for it because obviously America First is some racist bullshit. Or they can be against it, because H1B’s are used by evil corporations to depress wages.
Anyway, from what I’ve read, and from what I know how the world works, the latter option is much more convincing. And it’s buttressed by my working for a very large corporation that had its entire IT Support staff come from India, including entry-level support staff that could easily have been filled by native workers.
And, that said, I think the dividing line between authoritarianism and fascism might have something to do with fascists being willing to lose money for corporations, and this tells me that we are definitevely entering an explicitly fascist era, so I am not celebrating.
Only if one of those qualifications is “willing to work for peanuts”
There are plenty of qualified people in the US willing to do the work, but companies don’t want to pay us what we’re worth.
I disagree. But to be fair. Many of these companies put out jobs postings asking for people with decades of experience in fields or technologies only a year or two old. So no one was qualified by their standards. And that’s part of the problem.
The tech offices in Toronto and Vancouver have grown a lot over the years as the US makes it more difficult to bring foreign workers in (including Canadians). At least in Vancouver that has led to quite a tech boom, and it certainly isn’t just foreign workers getting jobs.
It’s kind of funny though because that is how it started. Offices that were just temporary stops for Indian and Chinese (mostly) devs while they waited for an H1B.
There are benifits to working on the same campus. Though the problem with trying to set up office overseas is now you have to flex to their cultural expectations have work with their legal frameworks. You may have to navigate their bribery/lobbying system as well, which might require even more overhead. All of which duplicative if they have to have that somewhere else in order to leverage the much more lucrative investment markets.
These are for profit companies the general motivation for them to do anything is to maximize the extraction of value. You’re right, they aren’t anti American nor pro immigrant. In a different geopolitical and economic market they would gladly pay warlords to maintain an active slave population as long as doesnt personally effect their social lives and the profit margins were wider then the h1b1 program.
Lies.