Microsoft barred from H-1B visas as fraud claim widens
The Trump administration has stopped Microsoft and several other tech employers from using the skilled-worker visa. Microsoft says 80% of its applications last year were for people already in the United States.
Microsoft and several other technology companies have been forbidden from using H-1B visas, after the Trump administration alleged fraud in how the programme is used. The H-1B allows highly skilled workers to enter the United States.
The administration has not published a list of the other companies covered, and no end date for the restriction has been announced.
Vice President JD Vance set out the rationale. He said Microsoft gets around the rule requiring employers to advertise jobs domestically before hiring from abroad.
Microsoft responded in a statement posted to its website on Thursday. It did not attack the administration; it argued with the numbers.
The company said the vast majority of its United States employees are Americans. On its own figures, 80% of its visa applications over the last year were for workers already in the country, and H-1B holders make up 1% of its workforce.
Microsoft also rejected the suggestion that its visa holders are underpaid. It said its wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings and that it pays H-1B employees the same as other staff doing comparable work.
The company did not set out why the roles in question could not be filled from within the United States. That is the part of the argument the administration is most likely to press.
The timing was awkward in both directions. Hours after the action against Microsoft, President Donald Trump awarded a medal to the company's chief executive, Satya Nadella, who came to the United States on an H-1B visa himself.
For founders, the immediate reading is about precedent rather than paperwork. The bar has moved from auditing individual petitions to barring a named employer from the programme outright.
A startup sponsoring two engineers has none of Microsoft's defences. It cannot point to a workforce where visa holders are 1% of headcount, and it cannot publish pay-band comparisons across thousands of filings.
It can, however, keep the evidence a fraud allegation would test: dated records of where each role was advertised, who applied, why domestic candidates were not hired, and what the role pays against comparable staff.
The advertising requirement is the specific mechanism Vance named. Any founder relying on a thin recruitment effort to clear it should assume that effort will be read back to them.
Microsoft's response is also a template of sorts. It answered with its own data, point by point, and left the politics alone.
More: Microsoft's newsroom