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The U.S. Department of Labor announced it would suspend Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program on Thursday, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said, as the Trump administration continues to take aim at immigration and foreign hiring programs ahead of November's midterm elections. Sonderling said the Labor Department won't accept or process any new applications under the program for a host of companies, including Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. The secretary said Adobe and Microsoft were also suspended "due to multiple active federal investigations." "Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They've received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That's hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers," Sonderling said. Vice President JD Vance criticized Microsoft specifically, pointing to the firm's 6,000 layoffs in 2025. Vance claimed that the company "replaced" those workers with people on H-1B visas. "So we're going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, 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," Vance said. Microsoft responded to Vance's claims and defended its hiring practices in a statement Thursday, saying "the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans." "Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees," the company said. President Donald Trump is set to award the National Medal of Science to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other leading technology CEOs on Thursday at the same summit where the suspension announcement was made. Nadella is from India and moved to the U.S. in 1988. He joined Microsoft in 1992. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su are also being honored at Thursday's medal ceremony. Each of the leaders immigrated to the U.S. Musk was born in South Africa and Su and Huang were born in Taiwan. "It's one thing if you want to bring in a person like Elon Musk," Vance said. "I think 99% of American citizens look at somebody like Elon Musk or Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, and they say, obviously, if that person wants to come in and build something great in the United States of America, we support that." Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple have been among the top sponsors of H-1B visas for decades. This year, Amazon had the highest number of petitions at 35,426 workers, followed by Cognizant and EY, according to 2026 data from Levels.fyi. Microsoft was a close fourth at 21,706 petitions for 2026, with a median base salary of $180,710. Microsoft said that petitions were only filed for workers "who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category," and said Microsoft's wages for H-1B workers were among the highest of all H-1B filings. CNBC has reached out to Adobe for comment.
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