When the Trump administration suspended Microsoft from a program that puts workers on the path to a green card, the move appeared to single out the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant for its hiring of foreign workers.

But it was not the first attack from the administration on Microsoft and other tech firms over their use of the H-1B visa program. Vice President JD Vance only upped the rhetoric last month when he cut Microsoft from the Permanent Labor Certification program, or PERM, a crucial step in the process that allows H-1B visa holders to work in the U.S. permanently as green card holders.

Using a hasty equation made up of the company’s recent layoffs and its H-1B approvals, Vance accused Microsoft of using the H-1B visa program to replace American workers, calling the entire system fraudulent.

But data from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Labor show that Microsoft’s usage of H-1B visas has been slowly trending down over the past few years. It also lags behind some of its peers like Amazon and Google.

Since 2018, Microsoft has had nearly 50,000 H-1B visa applications approved, a number that includes visa extensions, according to an analysis of federal immigration and labor data. Of those total approvals,11,220 were designated as “new approvals,” which means the beneficiary of an approval was either a worker new to the country, new to the company or previously held a different temporary worker status.

Those numbers are roughly one-third of the total approvals and about one-quarter of the new approvals that Amazon received in the same period. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant has a much larger workforce due to its warehouses, but its global corporate workforce is comparable to Microsoft’s. Numbers for each company’s U.S.-based corporate workforce are not readily available.

In the USCIS 2026 fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30, Microsoft had 542 new H-1B visa approvals, compared with 6,031 for Amazon, 2,201 for Google and 887 for Meta. The four companies are routinely among the highest issuers of H-1B visa applications in the tech industry.

Microsoft’s PERM data shows a much different trend. In the past couple of years, PERM applications plummeted for most tech companies — except for Microsoft.

Since 2024, Amazon had 311 certified PERM applications, Meta had 432, Google had five, while Microsoft had 4,200.

Microsoft hasn’t always been an outlier in certified PERM applications. From 2018 until the most available data this year, Amazon had 4,904 more PERM applications certified than Microsoft, according to data from the Department of Labor. Google is not far behind Microsoft in total numbers over the same period, while Meta, which has a much smaller workforce, lags behind all of them.

Layoffs

The shifting trends in PERM data in recent years could be a result of layoffs, which can throw a hitch in the arduous process of workers getting green cards.

Tahmina Watson, a Seattle-based immigration attorney, said layoffs can pause PERM applications for at least six months. If an organization or specific role has layoffs, any pending PERM application for a similar role is put on ice. It could potentially restart a process that typically takes over a year.

“If you’ve laid people off, the government wants to know so that you’re not eliminating an American worker’s job in favor of a foreign national,” Watson said. “After the mass layoffs in 2022, most companies paused PERM recruitment.”

Depending on how companies enact layoffs, that could cause fluctuations in PERM data. If a particular location or role is repeatedly affected by workforce reductions, it could keep extending those paused applications. Since the process takes over a year, multiple layoff rounds across back-to-back years may cause data to lag.

That shows up in the data, even for Microsoft. After receiving 1,089 certified PERM applications in 2023, its number dropped to 305 the next year before jumping back up to 2,391 in 2025. Microsoft had laid off about 10,000 employees in early 2023. The company also laid off 15,000 employees from May through July 2025, which likely won’t affect PERM certifications until next year.

Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment on why their PERM applications have dropped while their H-1B visa approvals keep rising. Google and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Other tech companies like Amazon and Google, which both went through layoffs in 2023, saw their PERM numbers drop in 2024 as well. They just haven’t recovered. H-1B approvals for those companies are picking back up, though, after a postlayoff lull that affected hiring in general in 2024.

H-1B visa applications historically have not been under the same rules as PERM applications. Companies do not have to pause applications after layoffs for H-1B visas, though the White House has targeted that.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that instituted a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, a cost companies would have to swallow. That fee was blocked in federal courts, as was an attempted “extension” of the order by Trump earlier this year.

Watson said that while the administration hasn’t been able to financially penalize companies over H-1B visas through regulation or executive order, it may be able to scrutinize them and make it harder. Tucked into the executive order from September that tried to extend the visa fee, the administration said it would specifically look at companies filing for H-1B visas that have recently had layoffs.

Recently, Watson said that she’s seeing the results of that order show up in the H-1B visa process. Her clients are now receiving requests for evidence, or RFEs, that are new and echo the language from Trump’s executive order.

“Our most recent H-1B RFE includes a section telling the company to show it hasn’t laid anybody off,” Watson said. “That is brand-new language.”

Watson said that immigration officials have also placed higher scrutiny on salary, that government workers are looking at “every pay stub for every H-1B worker.” She said when it comes to the H-1B visa lottery, the higher salary gets the win.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that immigration sponsorship doesn’t factor into hiring. The company considers supporting a foreign worker only after they go through a competitive hiring process. The spokesperson said this in part to reinforce compliance with local Washington laws.

Last month, after Vance’s announcement, Microsoft specifically pushed back on the administration’s claim that H-1B visa workers were used to undercut salaries among American workers.

Microsoft President Brad Smith reiterated Microsoft’s stance in a town hall meeting he publicly posted about two weeks ago.

“We’re one team. We have one compensation system, we strive to have one approach to reward people based on merit,” Smith said. “We don’t have a system that treats people on a visa at some lower level than people born in this country.”

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