US Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling pulled the plug on the green card pipeline for India's top IT giants on Thursday. He formally suspended Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini from the Permanent Labour Certification (PERM) programme. The freeze is immediate. No new applications will be accepted. No pending ones will be processed. The target is specific: these firms cannot sponsor H-1B visa holders for permanent US residency anymore.
Sonderling made the announcement alongside Vice President JD Vance. He pointed to the sheer volume of workers involved. Since 2009, these companies alone requested nearly three million foreign workers. The US government granted over 230,000 H-1B visas and more than 100,000 permanent labour certifications to them. Sonderling accused the firms of stealing hundreds of thousands of jobs from American workers.
Vance took a sharper tone. He labeled the companies "visa mills" and described the H-1B workers as "foreign indentured servants." He singled out Microsoft as the worst offender. Microsoft laid off 6,000 American employees in 2025. Yet in the same year, it secured over 6,000 H-1B approvals and filed 3,682 PERM applications. Vance claimed 1,000 of those applications were for the exact same positions just vacated by the laid-off US staff. "This is a fundamental insult to the American worker," Vance said. He alleged the companies bypass due process by placing fake job ads in small-town newspapers.
This is part of a broader Trump administration crackdown. The goal is to kill the cost-effective Indian talent model. They've already hiked application fees. Now they've cut the green card path. The impact will be felt by millions of Indian IT professionals who rely on the H-1B to green card route for long-term US careers. The firms have no official comment yet. The next step is clear: the Department of Labour will begin processing the backlog of rejected applications. The IT industry's lobbying machine will be in full swing by Friday.