In a blow to Indian IT majors, the United States on Thursday suspended several companies from the Permanent Labour Certification Programme, which lets firms apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers, arguing that the practice takes away jobs from Americans. The affected companies include Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, and HCL.
US Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the move, which also impacts Western behemoths like Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe. He was flanked by the head of the US Anti-Fraud Task Force and Vice President JD Vance.
“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.
He said the US government will not accept “any new or process” any pending permanent labour certification applications involving these companies.
“Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost three million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and over 100,000 permanent labour certifications,” Sonderling added.
He accused these companies of taking away hundreds of thousands of jobs from American workers.
The programme allows employers to sponsor foreign workers for permanent employment and residency.
Vance slammed Microsoft, describing it as a company that abused the system the most.
“Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying that it could not find qualified American employees – yet the company was approved for more than 6,000 H-1Bs and filed 3,682 PERM applications, including nearly 1,000 applications for the same positions as the laid-off American workers,” the vice president said.
Indian IT professionals bag the lion’s share of the approved H-1B visa applications every year. The Donald Trump administration has been taking measures, including steep application fees, to make it difficult for these companies to hire cost-effective talent from India and other South Asian nations to encourage hiring from America itself.
JD Vance today called foreign workers hired on H1-B visas “foreign indentured servants” and the companies using the programme as “visa mills”.
He also claimed that “something weird” is underway in universities that sponsor research scholars through the J-1 visa programme.
“Something weird is going on at these universities. They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers,” Vance said.
“This is a fundamental insult to the American worker and to the American way of life. We cannot allow visa programs that were designed to ensure that American corporations had access to the best and the brightest, to use them to undercut the wages of American workers,” he added.
Vance accused the firms, chiefly Microsoft, of subverting due process. He claimed the rules require companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labour that they need foreign workers.
“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” he claimed.
With inputs from PTI, AP