Microsoft President Brad Smith, shown speaking at a Microsoft event last year, told Politico this week that the Trump administration’s claims about the company’s foreign workers were “completely off base.” (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Microsoft President Brad Smith says someone apparently “failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers” before the Trump administration cut off the company’s ability to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency.
In an interview with Politico , published Thursday, Smith rejected Vice President JD Vance’s accusations of fraud and called his claim that Microsoft replaced laid-off Americans with foreign workers “completely off base.” He said Microsoft has “always been committed to a high integrity and high compliance” approach to immigration.
“We will stand by our record,” Smith said. “And I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture.”
At a White House news conference last week, Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while receiving 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.
“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, after asserting that there “has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft.”
Critics of the visa programs say tech companies have used them to displace U.S. workers, and that the job ads companies must run before sponsoring workers for green cards often appear in places few American job seekers will see. Labor Department records show Microsoft’s required print ads ran mostly in The Seattle Times.
Smith said most of Microsoft’s recent visa and green card applications were for people already working at the company, many of them for years, because of long green card backlogs. He also said Microsoft hired 9,200 American workers in its last fiscal year, a number he said was “left out of the narrative.”
The Microsoft executive also rejected the idea that the company pays visa holders less. “It doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker,” he said. “Everybody has the same compensation system.”
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He warned that the crackdown could send “the most talented next wave” of engineers to other countries. Five of the six tech leaders President Trump honored with national medals last week, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella , came to the U.S. as immigrants, Smith noted, and their companies together account for more than 25% of the value of the S&P 500.
“Let’s not put that at risk,” he said.
The suspension doesn’t stop Microsoft from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. Those are temporary work visas, typically granted for three years at a time and generally limited to six.
Amazon led in H-1B approvals for new employment in fiscal 2025, with 4,644, followed by Meta with 1,555 and Microsoft with 1,394, according to an analysis of USCIS data by the National Foundation for American Policy.
What Microsoft lost is access to a key step toward permanent residency. The program, known as PERM , is run by the Labor Department. Companies use it to sponsor foreign employees for permanent residency, also known as a green card. The employer has to advertise the job and show the department that no qualified, available U.S. worker can fill it.
PERM is commonly used for employees already working in the U.S. on temporary visas, including H-1Bs.
The interview didn’t address Microsoft’s outsized use of PERM. The company had more PERM cases decided than any other employer in fiscal 2025 and the first nine months of fiscal 2026, according to a GeekWire analysis of Labor Department data. Other big tech companies, including Amazon and Google, sharply reduced their PERM filings after early 2023.
