US Green Card Pathway Frozen for Microsoft and Indian IT Giants: What the PERM Suspension Means for Global Tech Workers

America's immigration crackdown has moved from speeches to real-world enforcement — and it has landed squarely on the tech industry. On October 8, the Trump administration suspended eight major technology companies, including Microsoft, Adobe and four Indian IT giants, from a key United States programme that lets employers sponsor skilled foreign workers for permanent residency. Thousands of engineers and IT professionals, many of them from South Asia, now face deep uncertainty over their futures in the US.

The programme at the centre of the row is called PERM — Permanent Labor Certification — a process run by the US Department of Labor. Under PERM, an American employer certifies that no qualified American worker is available for a given job, clearing the way for the employer to sponsor a foreign employee's green card application. The Department of Labor will now refuse to accept any new PERM applications involving the suspended firms and will stop processing pending ones.

The companies named are Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini — some of the largest employers of foreign tech talent in the world. Announcing the move, US Vice President JD Vance accused the firms of abusing foreign-worker programmes at the expense of American employees. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the companies had requested nearly 3 million foreign workers since 2009, arguing the practice shut Americans out of the job market. Vance went further on Microsoft, alleging it had laid off thousands of American workers while filing thousands of immigration petitions.

The companies pushed back hard. Microsoft said 80 percent of its roughly 6,000 H-1B filings over the last fiscal year were simply extensions or modifications for existing staff, not new hires, and that petitions for new recruits represented just 1 percent of its American workforce. Legal experts also questioned the logic: former US immigration official Doug Rand called the move incoherent, arguing that green cards actually free workers from being tied to one employer, since permanent residents can change jobs and negotiate wages freely.

India's government responded within a day. The Ministry of External Affairs said the restrictions did not advance the two countries' shared ambitions and could affect eligible workers' green card applications — though it stressed existing H-1B visa holders are unaffected. The industry body NASSCOM made the same distinction: PERM concerns permanent immigration, while the H-1B temporary work visa programme continues untouched.

The suspension is not happening in isolation. Around the same time, federal officials launched inquiries into J-1 exchange visa programmes at several elite universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, MIT and UC Davis. The message from Washington is consistent: every channel of foreign talent is under review.

For workers, the immediate pain is the limbo. A PERM filing can take a year or more; employees mid-way through the process with a suspended employer may now have to restart with a different sponsor or risk their entire green card timeline. For Pakistanis and Indians in the US tech workforce, this is a sharp reminder that employer-sponsored immigration depends on the employer's standing with the government.

The wider lesson extends beyond the US. As Washington tightens its gates, companies may rethink where they place engineering talent — accelerating the shift toward global tech hubs and remote teams in South Asia, including Pakistan. For skilled professionals watching from Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad, the American dream just got more expensive to buy into.

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