Note that this appears to be about green cards/permanent residency rather than h1b.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter.
It is an open secret that consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Capgemini, etc.) are abusing the employee sponsored green cards.
But I'm surprised that Microsoft is accused doing it. I was under the impression that Microsoft will sponsor your green card but is still very strict about whom they hire and retain, regardless of immigration status. But maybe that has changed?
Tata, Infosys, HCL, and similar body shops are definitely a different story.
If you’re laying off employees en masse and still processing green cards that in itself is a red flag.
Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.
Not if the category of employees is different. You are assuming all candidates and roles are fungible.
How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent
If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer.
I truly believe that software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly.
> If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer
This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.
> software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly
This, on the other hand, absolutely does.
I've worked with several excellent people in my career who progressed from customer support to QA to QA engineer to software engineer.
It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.
> Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported
Totally agree. I don’t think that means institutionalizing that pipeline is likely to yield those folks. They’re rare.
> This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.
Strictly a function of management quality and experience.
Not everyone is interested in programing. Some people are amazing at customer support and super extroverted and seek out jobs where they interact with customers and would be miserable looking at code all day. The opportunity should be there, but some people are just never going to be engineers. Management quality can't fix that.
I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.
I doubt that's the argument they're making. They're saying they are laying of a software engineer in one org, and hiring another software engineer in a different org. Not cross functional roles.
The army of developers stuck working helpdesk right now because they can't find work, would like a word.
Maybe they weren't exactly doing that. Calling a developer something else doesn't make it so.
Talent can be trained, less across jobs (although it's often what public services ask to entrepreneurs in some European countries), much more across departments.
I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs
In a lot of cases they are claiming that the layoffs are not based on performance. The government's argument is that if there are high-performing American nationals or green card holders that are being laid off, then there is no point in giving more green cards, or H1Bs.
That's the playbook Microsoft has been accused of running in various tech press for years, and is backed up by the fact that all of their products are going to shit. Azure, Exchange, XBox & first-party titles, just to name a few of the things I've seen takedown posts about how the departments are staffed exclusively with inexperienced devs overseen by burnt-out seniors, using Copilot to duct tape shit into a somewhat-working state.
I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.
> are abusing the employee sponsored green cards
As a foreigner: How does this work and what do they do?
For one thing, if you get laid off you only have two weeks to find another job or you need to leave the country. This balance of power is lop sided so the employer can get away with abusing the employee unreported.
No, green cards actually remove that constraint. You are a permanent resident, and you’re allowed to live in the US permanently. Irrespective of employment.
The future green card is dangled in front of the employee as the carrot to get them to put up with this situation for years.
And depending on where you are in the green card process, you might have to start all over again if you change employers.
not true, you can only "dangle" the PERM which gives you an I-140 petition. PERM is usually approved within 12-24 months. That's it. You cant dangle anything and cant force a bona fide employee to be a "subservient slave labor" like some people would imagine this process.
Once the I-140 petition is approved (14 days), and I-485 is pending for 180+ days, and employee can easily leave to another employer, it only takes them to file couple forms like transfer of H1B and transfer of I-140.
So the most you can keep the employee on a leash is ~2-3 years which happens to be median tenure at tech.
the immigration discourse is filled with false information, and for this reason I prefer only immigration attorneys discuss the matter as they are the most qualified of all the quirks and nuances of the US immigration law.
Employers can and do require a certain length of employment before initiating sponsorship.
Say that’s 12 months. If their I-40 is approved at 30 months, the employer can withdraw it for 180 days and the approval will be revoked.
So we’re talking 36 months until changing employers doesn’t set you back.
That is longer than the median FAANG tenure. That means you have an employee whose floor tenure is longer than the median.
And even then if at anytime the employee is fired (until they get their green card, which can take many many years), they have 60 days to find a new employer or leave the country.
silicon valley starts PERM from day1, lower tier firms require like couple years.
that's still absolutely normal regular tenure. You work for couple years, show your performance and convince your manager to initiate the perm process.
I have never ever seen anything even close to resembling the "servitude" conditions where tech workers are kept at one company against their will. Nobody is revoking your I-140, because you just transfer it when you change jobs.
re 60 days I agree, this is brutal and should be abolished. I believe H1B workers should be able to remain until the duration of their I-94 even without the job, to seek the new employment in case of job termination
OK,got this part - this is referring to abusing the employees.
I read the former comment like that they are abusing/missusing the "technical Greencard mechanics" to get their employees past some checks/approvals/permissions/whatever or acquire whatever "special benefits" by working around whatever rules
It's pretty simple: you work as much as we tell you or we fire you. And good luck finding another job super fast with another company willing to sponsor a visa. This is the abuse. Plus, I think the pay is also not that great compared to US counterparts.
not true, the tech is not a coal mine or a cotton farm. you cant whip your employees and keep them on a short leash.
please spare me stories of "abused tech workers" who have middle six figure comp, free lunches, unlimited PTO, bunch of perks, generous 401k matches and infinite matcha lattes.
absolutely delusional discourse.
Which also "conveniently" means those employees can effectively never unionise.
US citizens in tech never unionized themselves, because unionization will lead to stagnation. and tech industry is the opposite of stagnation
The government will take action on this, but not cruise ship visas. This has nothing to do with "explotation" and everything to do with trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers.
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
No, it's not.
I know plenty of of software engineers, good ones, who can't find work. Businesses which abuse the H1B and Green card programs to import cheaper workers when there is not a shortage of same here, are acting in bad faith and they know it. They are lying that the people they're bringing over are exceptionally skilled, and they are lying that they cannot find similar workers here at any price.
There's not a shortage of workers domestically anywhere in IT. Especially not now. There's a shortage of them willing to work for the shitty wages Amazon, Microsoft, etc. wants to pay those roles. So they hire companies like Infosys etc. to supply them, which they have done for decades by means of lies and fraud.
If they were bringing over truly exceptional individuals, that would be a different story.
To be clear none of this is even a knock on the skill and integrity of these workers they're bringing over. I'm just saying they are very similar to the tons of US-citizen engineers early in their careers who are out of work, and that if we were a real country, we'd prioritize citizens' need for a job above FAANG profits, by saying "Tough shit, pay more if you can't fill a position."
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
It is the color of the skin of those workers that matters to this administration, not their skill levels.
As discussed upthread, the PERM process is widely understood to be a farce, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the government has evidence of a Microsoft executive who wrote down that they didn’t want to replace a senior developer with 6 years of tenure. Everyone including JD Vance knows that’s a dumb outcome, but under the PERM regulations, you can only get that guy a visa if you tried and failed to replace him first.
Agreed. It's a farce on all sides. Most companies abuse H1B and PERM. We could reform immigration, by A. only allowing visas for people demonstrably very talented, stealing star performers from other countries instead of just taking bulk new grads. And then B. allowing green cards just on the basis of them paying lots of taxes, advancing in their job, establishing a family, etc. Because yes! Of course it's good for the American company to keep the tenured developer who has established themselves here!
But of course Congress is inhabited by people with the maturity level of children, so one party wants us to admit anyone who doesn't like their home country, and the other party mainly just wants to impress Trump, so no one will work on or negotiate on serious policy proposals.
From where is MS’ CEO now again?
It's an open secret that the US administration uses regulatory system for bribes and kickbacks, and no one should take them seriously regarding any rationale.
Not surprising seeing those names, that list of companies are notorious for exploiting H1B too. The main reason it needs stronger enforcement and per country caps/ratios.
Per country bans.
This is an open secret. My dad was an H visa (H1B didn’t exist yet) in an industry that uses a lot of H visas because the job involves recruiting public health experts for projects in foreign countries. He said that companies never advertise these jobs to Americans and will hide the posting in some obscure newspaper or whatever to bypass that requirement of the law.
As someone who had to interface with Cognizant,Infosys for many years while working for the US corporation - GOOD ! They should loose their privileges for H1B.
And Microsoft and Adobe added [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
Earlier they included Cloudera and Cognizant.
Indentured servant body shop to perm pipeline, usual suspects.
It's relatively straightforward to transfer a H1B, describing it as indentured servitude has always struck me as hyperbolic.
The situation could be easier, make approved I140s portable and issue an EAD, but you aren't trapped with an employer.
The green card process is not transferable. Once its started the applicant is stuck. I personally saw the company slow roll the process for one of my directs. I kept hassling them to move it along but to no avail. I saw this happen to colleagues at numerous companies.
Yup. I had a star developer on my team that we had been planning to sponsor but the company was being sold and our future was unclear. I had to advise her to go find a new job, because if she started the process with us and got laid off, even finding a new job willing to sponsor, she'd have to start over. She would run out of time on her existing visa and lose her legal status altogether.
It is transferable under AC21. But that’s not the point. You are not stuck with an employer on H1B.
Never heard of that. Apparently a lot of other people haven't either or consider it too risky as the government has to approve the transfer (as I found when searching for this now).
AC21 is the law that allows H1B to be renewed indefinitely with an approved I140.
It’s the reason Indians are allowed to stay in the U.S. whilst their Green Card is being processed. A bandaid on a completely broken system that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth.
> completely broken system
Absolutely
> that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth
?????
No more than 7% of EB Green Cards can be awarded to a single country and where you are born (not citizenship) determines which country you are allocated to.
The backlog for Indian born persons is over 100 years as a result.
https://www.cato.org/blog/18-million-employment-based-green-...
How is that a US problem?
Why should other people from other countries not be able to come here because a billion Indians want to migrate?
I don't think it's a US problem, that's a India problem.
I will say, I think the whole immigration system is a mess and I think it should be much easier and faster to immigrate to a different country as long as you can find work and meet the new country's various requirements. The systems that we have now globally pretty much suck.
It's fine to think this way but don't claim to be for meritocracy if you elevate one useless trait above the merit of others.
It can be a meritocracy while allowing equal access regardless of where one is born.
The whole idea is to allow for assimilation into the culture, not a replacement to any new dominant culture.
Then it’s not meritocracy.
That’s not the idea of the U.S. immigration system at all if that were the case these limits would apply to family based immigration classes too.
You want FIFO vs SFQ.
SFQ:
"Prevents a single aggressive download, peer-to-peer stream, or Denial of Service (DoS) attack from starving other users or conversations on the link. Requires very low CPU overhead compared to strict per-flow fair queueing."
Maybe a little hyperbolic, but the point is that it adds an additional significant shackle.
If I decide my company treats me like crap, I can apply to any* job in the US that I'm qualified for.
If an H1B feels the same way, they need to search within a smaller subset of jobs that are willing to do that paperwork. Last time I was hiring (2025) we were not open to sponsoring H1Bs or green cards. It's just a lot of extra work and legal expense, and frankly we found plenty of talented developers so we were right to not do it. Tons of employers don't deal with it.
* Note: Adjust this figure down somewhat to reflect the fake job postings that I never had a shot at, because the employer is just pretending to look for domestic candidates to satisfy H1B or PERM requirements.
So nothing close to "indentured servitude"? Let's give it another name and not undermine the history of slavery.
Same guys who flooded the UK IT market. Can't shed a tear for them.
I mean those Indian firms do abuse the visa system so good riddance
Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
Even if you're a laborer, it's quite hard to argue that the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool is dragging down your wages and not increasing total jobs.
If other countries are giving you better alternatives, why bring your talents to the US?
I don't think "top talent" is very well represented in the companies listed above...
It is when you think high salaries = top talent.
None of the above companies have what I would consider to be high salaries relative to their tech peers.
Microsoft is also included [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
> the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool
You can't be saying this in seriousness
most of these places are body shops, pretty much the opposite of “pinnacle of the labour pool”
> you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent
Just hire them remote overseas. One of the competitive advantages of hybrid organizations is they natively support international teams.
LOL. It's not "top talent" it's "cheap talent" or even just "more talent so the supply is larger and wages go down".
If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.
> Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
No. It’s not.
> other companies that would be suspended […] included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.
These companies are D tier talent, at best.
Top talent exists domestically, this is to hold wages down. It’s fine to impair the import conveyor and see what happens. If and when there is a labor shortage or wages spike horrendously (highly unlikely), certainly, we can revisit.
Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.
You are correct.
It also exists non-domestically...
If the US can bully countries into releasing 100M barrels of their own petroleum reserves, what makes you think the US can’t solve for that too? Other countries!
Everyone has a leverage point, everyone has a point at which the pain is worse than the ask. Companies and executives are easy, and usually of weak constitution. They fold fast, based on the evidence so far. US Big Tech fell in line super fast, right? “Fall in line or else.” If trillions of dollars in enterprise value and the resources it commands won’t save you, I’m unsure if anything else would.
It’s not right or wrong, it just is. We are living through a “might makes right” era. It’s not the first, won’t be the last (if history is our guide). This too shall pass.
> wages spike horrendously
Anything but that!
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS!!
Frankly talent doesn’t matter any more with AI - the skill floor for software has dropped to zero so an average dev now competes with the best devs. Marketing and capital matter way more.
It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.