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Microsoft laid off last year 6,000, 6,000 American workers.

At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.

In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, They replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.

That was Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House today announcing the U.S. Department of Labor was suspending Microsoft's ability to sponsor green cards for H-1B visa holders.

Now, the Trump administration has been trying to make changes to the H-1B program for a long time.

They've argued that companies are using the visas to basically hire cheaper foreign workers instead of Americans and that immigrants on these visas don't have the ability to quit or ask for better working conditions because they risk losing their status in the country.

So he said indentured servants.

The vice president went on to explain that's what he meant.

H-1B visas are designed to bring in these really highly skilled foreign workers that companies have a hard time hiring in the U.S., and they're capped at a total of $85,000 per year for the whole country.

Employers compete in a kind of lottery system to apply for them.

And the announcement today would mean that Microsoft can't use what's called the PERM program in the Labor Department.

It means that it'll block the company, the Labor Department will, from getting permanent residency benefits.

for their h-1b visa workers adobe was also part of this although not part of the initial announcement but the labor secretary added adobe to this later uh vance said our message to microsoft is you're a great american company but you've got to hire great american workers david big news for our our little local tech giant over the over the lake

Yeah, it is big news.

And it's also big news for people who were born, particularly in India, that is by far the largest constituency of people who are using H-1B visas.

I think it's about three quarters of folks are coming from India.

And there's no coincidence then that the second largest share of foreign born people living in the Seattle area are from India.

So This has sort of a direct impact on a lot of people who live here.

Microsoft, it should be worth saying, they came out with a statement just about an hour ago, kind of disputing some of the characterizations here.

They say, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.

These were not to hire new people.

It

wasn't like the one-to-one thing that the vice president presented where 6,000 American

workers or 6,000 workers were laid off and then 6,300 H-1B visa

people came