As the Trump administration announced on Thursday a suspension of green card applications for foreign employees by eight technology companies, Vice President JD Pence named Microsoft, stating that the company replaced the 6,000 employees it planned to lay off in 2025 with workers on H-1B work visas.

The suspension of the Department of Labor's PERM Green Card program will affect immigrants who are eligible for permanent residency, but it will not impact H-1B visas, as the latter are temporary work permits. However, H-1B approval data reveals the extent to which these companies rely on foreign labor.

Data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ) H-1B employer database also shows that Amazon and Meta are the largest sponsors of H-1B visas, and neither of these two companies has had their qualifications suspended.

This crackdown is not limited to the tech industry. At the same press conference on Thursday, Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D ' Esposito announced that investigations would be launched into visa fraud allegations involving 9 major American universities. Trump supporters have long believed that these programs have undermined the interests of American workers by incentivizing employers to hire from overseas.

Companies on the list

The 8 companies that had their qualifications suspended are all among the top 50 sponsors of the US H-1B. Most of them are IT service and consulting companies. The Adobe is the smallest in scale, ranking 45th.

The largest sponsor has not been suspended.

According to the USCIS data center, Amazon received 19,178 H-1B approvals in the 2025 fiscal year, while Meta received 6,294. These two companies are the top two sponsors respectively, but neither has had their sponsorships suspended. Microsoft follows closely behind with 6,258 approvals. For many years, Microsoft has received more sponsorships than Amazon; however, Amazon overtook Microsoft in 2017, and now its number of approvals is approximately three times that of Microsoft.

"If you do the math, for every employee laid off, Microsoft replaces them with one and a half foreign contract workers... Microsoft is a great American company, and we maintain a very good relationship with them." — Vice President of the United States JD Pence

What do the data indicate?

These numbers also have two sides. Last year, Microsoft indeed received over 6,000 H-1B approvals, as Vance mentioned. However, two-thirds of those were given to people who were already working at the company. In contrast, Amazon has introduced nearly four times as many new H-1B employees, yet they are not on the suspension list.