Vice President JD Vance unfairly accused Microsoft last week of replacing American workers with “foreign indentured servants” just hours before President Donald Trump presented the company’s immigrant CEO with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The dichotomy underscored the paradox of the administration’s crackdown on legal immigration.
Vance’s news conference, weeks before the midterms, appeared aimed at motivating apathetic elements of the MAGA coalition. Since Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, immigration has been the most reliable way to galvanize his base. But the president himself has often drawn a distinction between promising to crack down on illegal migration while welcoming talented people who come into the country through proper channels.
Vance’s accusation against Microsoft is deceptively simple: The firm laid off about 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. “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.
But there is no evidence these foreign workers were substitutes for Americans laid off by the company based in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft says that 80 percent of its H-1B applications were to extend or change the status of existing employees. “The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce,” the company said in a statement. “They are not new arrivals to our country.”
Microsoft employs 121,000 people in the U.S., more than half its global workforce. The great majority are American citizens. Not that the company is legally obliged to hire only American workers. And if Microsoft is going to stay competitive, especially in the race for artificial-intelligence dominance, it must be able to hire the best people it can find, anywhere on the planet.
Vance said Microsoft will be suspended from participating in a Labor Department program that allows companies to sponsor skilled foreign workers with H-1B visas for green cards. The irony is that Vance’s policy change will make the workers he calls “indentured servants” more dependent on their employers for maintaining their legal immigration status. Once workers have a green card, they’re free to change jobs.
Leave aside Vance’s insult of Microsoft’s “foreign indentured servants,” visa holders who played by the rules for the opportunity to participate in the world’s largest economy. Let’s talk about the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella. An immigrant from India, Nadella was one of six recipients of national medals at a White House ceremony on the same day Vance spoke. Five of the honorees immigrated to the U.S.; in addition to Nadella, the others were South African immigrant Elon Musk, Russian immigrant Sergey Brin and Taiwanese immigrants Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. The homegrown talent: Texan Michael Dell.
Trump praised Nadella as “a key figure in the transformation of Microsoft, revolutionizing the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers from all over the world with some of the most capable software ever built.” Why on earth would his administration want to close the door to the next Satya Nadella?
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