Microsoft’s H-1B Double-Speak

A company like Microsoft, one of America’s great technological innovators, is unaccustomed to harsh public reprimands from the White House. So it reacted with indignation when Vice President JD Vance took to a Washington stage to announce a crackdown on H-1B visa abuse, saying of Microsoft that there had been “no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more” and warning it could no longer “lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

Microsoft pushed back hard, with company president Brad Smith calling Mr. Vance’s remarks “completely off base.” Someone “had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers,” he said. Most of Microsoft’s applications were for workers already employed, he said, not for new hires.

This is what political operatives call a “non-denial denial.” The vice president had observed that Microsoft is laying off thousands of American workers while simultaneously securing thousands of H‑1B visas and PERM certifications for foreign workers. That’s true. But Congress created those programs to address genuine labor shortages. Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Brad Smith have long embraced that framing, each telling Congress that the company’s voracious demand for foreign workers is driven by a shortage of qualified American tech talent. Why was a company professing a severe shortage requiring thousands of foreign workers while at the same time dismissing thousands of Americans with similar or better skills?

In fact, Microsoft’s abuse of the system is longstanding, and lawmakers have raised concerns for years. As far back as 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to then-CEO Steve Ballmer asking how the company could be announcing 5,000 layoffs so soon after lobbying on Capitol Hill for more H-1B visas. Fast-forward to January 2023, and Microsoft was at it again, announcing plans to lay off 10,000 workers—about 5% of its workforce—and then two months later registering 3,900 positions as needing foreign workers in the FY2024 H-1B lottery.