The Trump administration’s Thursday declaration that it was suspending Microsoft and Adobe from a federal visa sponsorship program is reverberating through the tech industry.
Immigration attorneys told Business Insider that employees on H-1B visas working at Microsoft, Adobe, and the other named tech companies should seek counsel and get clarity about their status in light of the suspensions.
Individual cases may vary, and the attorneys spoke in general terms about the advice they would give without knowing a client’s specific circumstances or status.
“This is a time where immigrants, high-skilled immigrants, really need to pay attention to laws,” said Tahmina Watson, a business immigration attorney at Watson Immigration Law in Seattle. “Things are changing on a dime,” she added.
Business Insider spoke to eight immigration attorneys on Thursday in the wake of the announcement, as part of our ongoing series, “H-1B Fallout: 1 Year Later,” which explores how foreign workers are navigating a rapidly changing US immigration landscape.
Some of the immigration attorneys said the suspensions were likely to be challenged in court. Others said they were the latest in a series of US measures targeting foreign workers. One attorney suggested they would only impact a relatively small group of workers.
“Most people will either be able to wait it out or have time to switch jobs,” said Loren Locke, an attorney at Locke Immigration Law in Atlanta.
The Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM, program is an initial step that employers generally must complete before sponsoring a worker for an employment-based visa, requiring them to show that no qualified and available US workers could fill the role.
Vice President JD Vance said at a press conference on Thursday that Microsoft had “abused” this system by laying off American workers and using it to hire foreign ones, who he said were paid less. “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.
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A Microsoft spokesperson pointed Business Insider to a blog post the company published Thursday, which said “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.” The company said it pays its H-1B employees “the same as any other employees doing comparable work.”
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Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said at the press conference that the government would not accept any new PERM applications or process any pending ones for the named companies, which, in addition to Microsoft and Adobe, also include tech outsourcing firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini.
The importance of knowing your status
In suspending new and pending PERM applications, the Trump administration left a very specific group of H-1B visa holders in limbo, said Matthew Maiona, an immigration attorney at Maiona Ward in Boston.
Maiona said that a hypothetical employee at Microsoft or Adobe, six years into an H-1B visa, could now, in theory, be ordered to appear in immigration court under this new suspension.
“You could be in trouble if you cannot qualify for another non-immigrant visa classification,” Maiona said. “You may have to leave the United States.”
But Locke said workers would only face potential removal if they exhausted their H-1B eligibility and could not secure an extension or another legal basis — of which there are several — to remain in the country.
Though H-1B visas have a statutory maximum of six years before expiring, they can be extended past that number if workers have made sufficient progress toward obtaining a green card, she said.
“If the goal is to crush H-1B workers, it’s not great, but it’s not really crushing them either,” Locke said.
Todd Pomerleau, an immigration attorney based in Boston, said that with uncertainty around the extent and enforcement of the suspensions, “anybody who’s concerned about their immigration status needs to seek competent counsel.”
‘We will start seeing lawsuits’
Some immigration attorneys who spoke with Business Insider said they expected the Trump administration’s move to be challenged in a lawsuit that would argue the suspensions are outside the Labor Department’s legal authority.
“I assume, by next week, we will start seeing lawsuits,” said Kripa Upadhyay, the co-chair of Buchalter’s Immigration & Global Mobility Practice, a Seattle firm.
Ted Chiappari, the head of immigration law at Duane Morris LLP, said federal statute only allows the Department of Labor to unilaterally suspend an employer from using the PERM program for 180 days.
“That gives the employer notice that there’s an investigation going on, and at the end of that investigation, if they find something inappropriate, they have six years to decide whether to debar an employer,” he said.
And even then, Chiappari said, they can only debar an employer for up to three years.
Only the latest H-1B broadside
Few attorneys interviewed by Business Insider said they were surprised by the measure. Mostly, they saw it as another salvo in what they described as the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on foreign workers.
Upadhyay said that just the day before, she had spoken with a Microsoft employee on an H-1B whose spouse also was on an H-1B.
The person’s H-1B extension was running out, and they now faced the “impossible decision” of moving to their home country, leaving behind their spouse and two US citizen children.
“I have children to support,” Upadhyay recalled the worker saying. “What happens now?”
Upadhyay expects to get more of these calls.