JD Vance spins a tale about ‘indentured servants’ filling the jobs of laid-off Americans, entirely unsupported by facts.
Vice President JD Vance, usually known for his fastidious honesty, took the opportunity to attack Microsoft for legally hiring immigrants when he announced that the administration would stop processing employee green cards for it and seven other tech companies.
BREAKING: VP JD Vance takes aim at Microsoft, accusing the tech giant of laying off thousands of American workers while bringing in foreign workers to replace them through the H-1B visa system.
"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the… pic.twitter.com/wg64GulkFg
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) October 8, 2026
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft,” said Vance. To support his claim, he pointed to Microsoft laying off 6,000 workers last year, while “at the same time benefitting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards,” he said. “In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half indentured servants.”
For context, Microsoft has 121,000 employees in the United States. Nothing in that data suggests that the company’s immigrant workers hold the same positions as those who were laid off, or that there was any deliberate “replacement.” Vance also does nothing to distinguish “replacement” hirings of immigrants from regular turnover or entirely new roles. He lumps them all together and draws a misleading connection to company-wide layoffs.
A bigger problem with Vance’s claim is that four-fifths of Microsoft’s immigrant workers weren’t even hired last year, when they supposedly “replaced” Americans. The company explains, “Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people.”
Furthermore: “The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country.” Most of these are workers are likely fresh out of American colleges or switching jobs.
And yes, H-1B workers can switch jobs — and they do so quite often. In fact, half of new H-1B visas are for immigrants already in the program who are changing jobs. They are not “indentured servants.”
It’s true that workers on H-1Bs have less labor mobility than citizens have, since any new employer must go through the trouble of reapplying for the visa, and many are hesitant to do so. But this is where Vance does his worst bait-and-switch. The Labor Department is halting the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) process for new hires, which is required for new permanent green cards, not temporary H-1B visas. The separate vetting process for H-1Bs and other short-term work visas, the Labor Condition Application (LCA), was apparently left untouched.
Therefore, the administration’s action will affect only green-card sponsorships at Microsoft and other companies, not H-1Bs. And once approved, green-card holders can immediately switch jobs freely and without any public review, as they have become permanent residents. Even if you think the H1-B program is a form of indentured labor, green cards certainly aren’t. If anything, this change will keep more workers on temporary status “indentured” for longer, as they’ll be prevented from graduating to absolute mobility.
Since the policy he announced has nothing to do with H-1B visas, Vance probably brought them up because more people have negative views of them than of green cards. As we already know, as he sees it, moving the ball forward politically is a good defense for lying.