The two numbers Vice President JD Vance put side by side on Thursday were these: Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year, he said, “at the same time the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.” The penalty matches the framing: the White House is suspending Microsoft from the federal program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for US permanent residency, accusing the company of abusing immigration rules. Microsoft disputes the claim, and its shares dropped more than 1 percent after the announcement, as Joe Miller reported in the Financial Times.

What Microsoft lost access to

Microsoft is not the only name on the list. Reuters reported that the suspension also covers Adobe and six large outsourcing firms, a freeze the wire framed as a response to alleged fraud; the Washington Post writes that Microsoft is under investigation for its hiring practices. The program in question — known by its labor-department shorthand, Perm — is the stage of employer-sponsored permanent residency where a company must certify the labor market before a sponsored worker’s green card can proceed. It sits down-pipeline from the H-1B, the skilled-worker visa allocated by lottery. Before the recent fee increase, registering for that lottery cost $215 and the base employer sponsorship fee was $780, and more than 400,000 such visas were approved last year, per the FT. The suspension does not cancel anyone’s visa; it blocks one step toward converting a temporary one into residency.

The worker pool at the end of that pipeline is heavily Indian, and largely stuck. Indians receive the most H-1B visas, but nearly 1 million people from India were waiting for employment-based permanent residency as of December last year, according to an August study by the non-profit National Foundation for American Policy — a backlog measured in decades, which has made the H-1B-to-green-card path unreachable for most of them, a tenure of careers built on an expiring document. Nasscom, the Indian IT services lobby, said the number of employees moving to residency through Perm was “relatively limited” because Indian tech companies had “significantly reduced their dependence on H-1B visas.”

The numbers Vance used, and the numbers that answer them

What the juxtaposition of 6,000 layoffs and 6,300 visas shows is less established than Vance’s delivery suggested. For the pairing to demonstrate replacement, the visa petitions would have to be for new hires in the same roles as the laid-off workers; Microsoft says the applications Vance cited were largely “to extend or change the status” of existing employees — the same workers, renewing. The two figures also measure different populations: layoffs are counted company-wide, visa petitions only where a foreign worker sits. Vance’s other figure was a wage gap — some H-1B holders, he said, earn between $20,000 and $48,000 less than US citizens hired for similar positions. As reported, he named no dataset, so there is no base, sample size or methodology to check the spread against.

Microsoft’s counter is a wage claim of its own, equally unaudited from the outside: “Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category. We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings.” One independently checkable ranking cuts partly against the administration’s target selection. USCIS data cited by Reuters puts Amazon first among employers of approved H-1B beneficiaries in fiscal 2026, followed by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Apple and Microsoft. Amazon was not mentioned at Thursday’s press conference.

The same administration, at a separate event on Thursday, presented Microsoft’s Indian-born chief executive Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, alongside South African-born Elon Musk and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, born in Taiwan. Vance said there was no contradiction: “Our message to Microsoft is: ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.’” The White House also announced a fraud investigation into the use of J-1 student visas at nine American universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. The number now worth watching is what happens to the near-3,000 green-card filings a year at Microsoft alone while the suspension stands — and whether anyone else of Amazon’s size joins the list.