Vance Freezes Green Cards for Microsoft and Infosys, the Outsourcer Indiana Offered $86 Million to Hire Hoosiers

Vice President JD Vance, who announced the green-card freeze Thursday, in his official January 2025 portrait. Credit: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Vice President JD Vance, who announced the green-card freeze Thursday, in his official January 2025 portrait. Credit: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

"For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants." Vice President JD Vance did that arithmetic out loud Thursday at a White House press conference, then told the world's best-known software company it was locked out of the green-card line until it changes how it hires, according to ABC News.

Microsoft has company on the list. Adobe is on it, and so are six giant IT outsourcing firms: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said, as quoted by Reuters via CNA.

Hoosiers should look twice at the fourth name on that list.

Indiana already wrote Infosys a check

In 2018 Infosys promised Indiana it would grow to 3,000 Indianapolis-area employees by the end of 2023, according to the state's own announcement. In 2019 the Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered the company an incentives package totaling $86 million, the largest piece being $56.5 million in hiring-based EDGE tax credits, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported. The city sold Infosys 58 acres of old airport land and a renovated parking garage for $1 each.

The jobs did not show up on schedule. By IBJ's October 2024 count, Infosys had claimed $5.17 million of those EDGE credits, less than a tenth of what it could earn, and had until the end of 2026 to hire enough Hoosiers to claim the rest. A local Infosys executive had told city officials in 2022 that the company had "hired over 1,000 to date." The Hoosier Enquirer found no newer public tally from the company or the IEDC.

That clock runs out in less than three months, and now the federal government has stopped processing Infosys's permanent labor certifications. At least one recent Indianapolis job posting from the company already tells applicants that "Infosys is unable to provide immigration sponsorship for this role now or in the future." If the freeze pushes outsourcers to fill Indianapolis seats with Americans, that is exactly the hiring Indiana's incentive deal was supposed to buy.

How the PERM door works

The program Vance froze is called PERM. It is the Labor Department certification an employer needs before sponsoring a foreign worker for permanent residency. "If the H-1B visa is how the people get into the country, the PERM program is how they stay in the United States," Vance said, per ABC.

He did not soften the target. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft," Vance said. He told reporters Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. Those are the administration's figures; no court or agency finding has backed them up yet.

Microsoft pushed back. In a statement to ABC, the company said "the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans" and that it pays H-1B employees "the same as any other employees doing comparable work." Adobe had not answered ABC's request for comment, and none of the reports we reviewed carried a response from Infosys.

Attorney General Todd Blanche added that the Justice Department "is actively investigating companies" that favor foreign workers over Americans.

A medal the same afternoon

The timing is awkward for the White House. The same Thursday, President Trump handed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the administration's innovation summit, ABC reported. Vance owned the contradiction. "Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them," he said, "but we're also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first."

How long that lasts is open. The suspension will "last as long as it needs to," Vance said, and the administration has "a number of tools to suspend it indefinitely." Washington has promised H-1B reform for decades and rarely delivered. The proof this time will be whether the freeze holds once the lobbyists show up, and whether any company actually changes how it hires.

Nine campuses get subpoenas

The task force also went after higher education. Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito said subpoenas have already gone to nine universities over alleged misuse of J-1 exchange-visitor visas: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, MIT, Caltech, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis and Arizona State, Inside Higher Ed reported. Vance said those schools use J-1 visas on federally funded grants at "about 61 percent," against a 38 percent national average, to "undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers."

"If an American university is breaking the law to save a dollar, while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence. It's institutional betrayal," D'Esposito said. Those are accusations, not findings. Purdue, IU and Notre Dame are not on the list.

Harvard alone sponsored 2,218 new J-1 visitors in 2024, TIME reported from federal data. The administration says it is enforcing rules already on the books. Indiana has a rule on its own books too: Infosys earns the rest of that $56.5 million only by hiring Hoosiers, and the deadline is Dec. 31.

Reporting: ABC News, Oct. 8, 2026; Politico, Oct. 8, 2026; Reuters via CNA, Oct. 9, 2026; TIME, Oct. 9, 2026; Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 9, 2026; Indianapolis Business Journal via Inside Indiana Business, Oct. 7, 2024; State of Indiana / IEDC, April 26, 2018.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.