Washington, Oct 16 (IANS) Microsoft President Brad Smith has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s charge that the company abuses the H-1B visa programme as “completely off base”, and warned that blocking skilled immigrants’ path to green cards could cripple the US technology sector for more than a generation.
“Someone had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers,” Smith said in an interview with Politico, published on Thursday.
He said the “vast majority” of Microsoft’s green-card applications were for long-time employees, not new hires. “Unfortunately, it’s just because the green card backlog is so long,” he said.
Smith also denied that Microsoft paid foreign workers less than Americans. “It doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker, everybody has the same compensation system,” he said.
He said Microsoft hired more than 9,000 US-born workers last year, and that they had been “left out of the narrative”.
“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.”
The interview, given on Wednesday on the sidelines of an AI summit in Dublin, came less than a week after Vance announced that Microsoft and seven other companies would be barred from seeking green cards for their skilled foreign workers.
The Labour Department on October 8 suspended permanent labour certification, or PERM, filings by the eight employers, including Indian IT majors Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCLTech. PERM is the first step in most employer-sponsored green cards.
Vance accused Microsoft of fraud, saying it used the H-1B programme to avoid hiring Americans at higher salaries. “You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” he said of Microsoft. He said the suspension would “last as long as it needs to”.
No written Labour Department notice setting out the scope or length of the suspension had been published as of October 13, according to immigration lawyers. A department rule lets it suspend PERM processing for up to 180 days during a fraud investigation. None of the eight companies has been charged.
Smith pointed to the timing. The suspension was announced the same day President Donald Trump presented Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, who once held an H-1B visa, with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
“We should consider the fact that when the president honored six Americans with these technology and science medals, five of the six had come to the United States as immigrants,” Smith said.
“Think about what those five individuals have done for the well-being, even the wealth and standard of living, of Americans across the country. Let’s not put that at risk,” he said.
He warned against “sending — intentionally or inadvertently or otherwise — signals that send the most talented next wave of AI [or] SI software engineers to other countries, rather than the United States”.
In an October 8 statement, Microsoft said that of about 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, 80 per cent were to extend or change the status of existing employees. “We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work,” the company said.
Indians are the largest group of H-1B holders and face the longest green-card waits. India’s External Affairs Ministry said last week that the US steps “do not advance the shared ambitions of both countries”.
--IANS
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