By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
NEW YORK: The Trump administration has decided that the surest way to protect American workers is to shut out the people who help employ them. On Thursday, Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling, standing beside Vice-President JD Vance, suspended eight employers from the Permanent Labour Certification (PERM) programme, the compulsory first step towards an employment-based green card. They are Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini.
The Labour Department will accept no new filings from them and decide no pending ones. Existing H-1B status and certifications already issued survive. But for engineers who have spent years in the queue, the freeze closes the only road to permanence.
Sonderling says that since 2009 the eight collectively requested almost three million foreign workers, won more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and obtained over 100,000 labour certifications. Vance singled out Microsoft. He cited about 6,000 American layoffs in 2025, more than 6,000 H-1B approvals and 3,682 PERM filings, nearly 1,000 of them for positions involving laid-off workers. He called H-1B workers “foreign indentured servants.”
A company that dismisses Americans and sponsors foreigners for the same roles should answer for it. But these are allegations tied to active investigations, not findings. Seventeen years of cumulative filings do not prove that any single American was displaced. Microsoft says roughly 80 per cent of its H-1B filings last year were extensions or status changes for existing staff, not new overseas hires. And the punishment falls on employees who broke no rule.
The displacement thesis assumes a foreign hire is a cheaper stand-in for an American who was available. PERM’s own design contradicts that. Before sponsoring anyone, an employer must test the US labour market, show that no qualified, available American is being displaced, and pay the prevailing wage.
A distinction is needed here. The outsourcing model, delivering work from Bengaluru or Hyderabad at lower cost, does have a cost logic, and critics are right to say so. But going offshore is what firms do when talent cannot be found at home. It is not the same as undercutting an American at the next desk.
The green card concerns something else: keeping people already in America, already paid at legal wage floors. It is also the cure for the “indenture” Vance deplores. A worker with a green card can change employers, demand a raise or start a company. A worker denied one is tied to a sponsor. The freeze manufactures the dependency it condemns.
The numbers are not subtle. Indian Americans number 5.1 million, about 1.5 percent of the population. Roughly 2.8 million are first-generation immigrants, and about 70 per cent hold citizenship.
Indiaspora and Boston Consulting Group estimate they pay 5 to 6 percent of all US income tax, some $250–300 billion. Pew puts their median household income at $151,200 in 2023, against a national median near $83,700.
At the top, Indian-origin chief executives ran 16 Fortune 500 companies in 2023. They included Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and Vertex’s Reshma Kewalramani, and together they employed 2.7 million Americans and generated nearly $1 trillion in revenue. The irony is stark. Microsoft, led by an Indian-born chief executive, is the freeze’s principal target, and Adobe, long run by Indian-born Shantanu Narayen, sits beside it.
Entrepreneurship tells the same story. The National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) found in June 2026 that immigrants founded or co-founded 455 of 775 American unicorns (59 per cent), collectively worth about $5 trillion. Indian-born founders are behind 96 of them, more than any other country. An NFAP count in 2016 found 14 Indian entrepreneurs among the founders of 87 unicorns, though the methods differ. So the decade’s rise is real but should not be over-read. Immigrant-founded unicorns average 833 employees each.
In artificial intelligence, NFAP found in 2023 that immigrants started 65 per cent (28 of 43) of the top US AI companies. Among today’s highest-valued immigrant-founded firms are SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks. These are the companies the freeze says it wants to protect from foreign competition.
Frontier AI is won by scarce, mobile specialists, and uncertainty is a tax on them. A researcher choosing between offers in California, Toronto, London and Singapore will discount the one that cannot promise permanence. The freeze reaches beyond eight names, because every employer that sponsors foreign talent must now ask whether it is next. No one can plan a five-year engineering roadmap around a programme that can be switched off by announcement.
The cost is double. American firms lose people they trained, and often the teams those people would have built. Indian firms, which run delivery centres at home and staff client sites in the US, lose the ability to place and retain specialists on American premises. Clients who need engineers on site will pay more or take their business elsewhere. Neither outcome helps an American worker. The likelier winners are rivals. Canada, Britain, Germany and Singapore are all courting skilled migrants, and China need only let America do the work.
Four of the eight, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL, are Indian-headquartered. Cognizant is American-based, Capgemini is French, and Microsoft and Adobe are quintessentially American. But India bears the heaviest burden, because Indians are by most counts the largest group of H-1B holders and the longest-waiting green-card applicants.
There is a serious case for policing fraud and enforcing wage floors, and the administration is entitled to make it.
If Microsoft sacked Americans to sponsor foreigners for the same jobs, it should be investigated and punished if guilty. But the instrument chosen is a blunt freeze that falls on workers rather than wrongdoers, announced before any finding has been made public.
America did not become the world’s innovation capital by guarding its labour market against talent. It got there by being the place where talent wanted to stay. It is where an engineer from Hyderabad could become a chief executive and a graduate student from Chennai could found a company worth billions.
A policy that turns the green card into a gamble does not protect American workers. It taxes the companies, Indian and American alike, that must compete with China and Europe for the same scarce brains. It is retrograde, and the bill will be paid in the next breakthrough that happens somewhere else. (IPA Service)
