Microsoft pushes back on Vance's H-1B visa claims

Alex Halverson, The Seattle Times on Oct 8, 2026

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After the Trump administration’s latest attack on tech companies over their use of the H-1B visa program, Microsoft is disputing a claim by Vice President JD Vance that last year it hired thousands of workers from other countries.

Microsoft said in a statement Thursday that the workers “are not new arrivals to our country.”

Vance announced Thursday that the administration was suspending Microsoft, and other companies like Adobe, from a program to apply for green cards for workers using H-1B visas.

The vice president specifically named Microsoft and referenced the company’s 2025 waves of layoffs, then said Microsoft replaced those 6,000 laid-off U.S.-based employees with foreign workers.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said, referring to the 6,000 H-1B visas and 3,000 green cards that Microsoft obtained for employees.

In its statement, Microsoft pushed back on Vance’s back-of-the-envelope math. The company said that of the 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted last year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. The rest were for prospective workers who already lived in the U.S. and were coming to Microsoft from another company.

“If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position,” Vance said. “If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position.”

In response to Vance’s claim that H-1B visa employees are paid less than U.S.-born workers in similar roles, Microsoft flatly denied that, saying “Our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings. We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work.”

“We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce,” Microsoft said. “That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.”