This is the most pro-worker administration in generations.
“This is a fundamental insult to the American worker and the American way of life.”
That was Vice President JD Vance at a recent press conference on abuses in foreign worker programs that didn’t get the attention it deserved. Flanked by the attorney general, the secretary of labor, and others in his anti-fraud task force, the vice president announced unprecedented moves in response to corporate and university abuse of visa programs that harm American workers.
Pursuant to President Trump’s September executive order to enhance the integrity of the H-1B program, Vance announced that Microsoft, Adobe, and half a dozen big Indian rent-a-programmer firms were suspended from converting their H-1B workers to permanent green cards through what is known as the “PERM” process. This is important because many foreigners come here on “temporary” H-1B visas precisely as a means of permanent immigration.
To illustrate the abuses of the program, Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 Americans and at the same time hired more than 6,300 H-1Bs, and rewarded more than 3,000 “temporary” foreign workers with permanent residence
This was not presented as an attack on Microsoft; Vance said, “Our message to Microsoft is ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers — you cannot lay off American workers and replace them with foreign indentured servants.’”
The debarment of two marquee tech firms from using the PERM process to convert H-1Bs to green cards is especially notable since the latest version of the list of debarred firms includes just two no-name entities. This is an important tool to compel compliance that has almost never been used.
It’s also notable that the recent announcement targeted both Indian staffing firms and high-profile U.S. firms. This runs contrary to decades of messaging by politicians that, with regard to their use of foreign labor, “Intels are good, Infosyses are bad,” in the words of the late Norman Matloff, a UC Davis professor and critic of the H-1B program. What he meant by that is that politicians were often comfortable attacking use of H-1Bs by Indian outsourcing firms like Infosys (which was in fact included in the recent action announced by Vance), but were more protective of big U.S. firms like Intel, saying that their use of H-1Bs was legitimate. (Intel was not included in the recent debarment; Matloff selected the names years ago for alliteration.)
Vance’s action is a first in officially identifying the name-brand domestic firms and the Indian ones as both being abusers of the program.
Although the debarment Vance announced applies to the PERM program and not to the H-1B program directly, it’s relevant because PERM is the final stretch of a foreign worker pipeline that starts with admission of foreign students; who then transition to the “Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, where foreign graduates engage in full-time employment while masquerading as “students”; then the OPTs convert to H-1B; and finally the H-1Bs get green cards.
One of the reasons the debarments announced this month didn’t relate to the H-1B program directly is that Congress crafted the law such that the outrages mentioned by the vice president — the direct replacement of Americans by H-1Bs — are explicitly legal. For all the fulmination by members of Congress after the front-page New York Times story in 2015 about Disney firing its entire American IT staff and replacing them with H-1Bs — whom the Americans were required to train — no one actually tried to do anything about it until now. It’s still up to Congress to fix the program, but Vance’s announcement is an indication that the administration isn’t holding its breath.
(There is a debarment list for H-1B specifically, but it includes just six no-name users of the program.)
Though it was published after Vance’s announcement, an analysis by my colleague John Miano of H-1B data released pursuant to a Bloomberg News Freedom of Information Act request shows that Microsoft is indeed using H-1B to import cheaper labor. Miano broke out Microsoft’s H-1Bs by country of origin, and ranked them by the wage difference with comparable U.S. workers. It turns out that in 2023-24 Microsoft paid H-1Bs from a few countries more than comparable Americans, but those were one-offs; Microsoft’s H-1Bs from India and China, who account for the vast majority of H-1Bs, were paid dramatically less — about $20,000 less for Indians and $25,000 less for Chinese. (CIS will publish a detailed analysis of all the data soon.)
The other initiative announced at the press conference was an investigation into abuse of the J-1 “cultural exchange” visa by top universities to import cheap labor for their research labs, often to work on federally funded programs. The targets of the investigation include Harvard, Yale, MIT, CalTech and others, and Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said, “If an American university is breaking the law to save a dollar, while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence, it’s institutional betrayal.”
Just as Microsoft is not exempt from the PERM debarment, D’Esposito, a former NYPD detective, colorfully made clear that big-name universities won’t get a pass either: “I don’t care how prestigious a university thinks it is, break the law and screw the American people, and I will personally cuff you in the university square.”
Was the announcement a political stunt? Political, yes; stunt, no. Everything’s political because there’s an election coming up, but these aren’t announcements to convene a committee to think about doing something someday, but real, concrete actions designed to protect the bargaining power and livelihoods of American workers.
Gas prices are too high, the Iran war was ill-conceived, and Trump’s shenanigans continue to embarrass. But the initiatives discussed above, combined with increased job-related immigration enforcement that has helped the wages of blue-collar workers, make it fair to say this is the most pro-worker administration in generations.