Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith reacted to the Donald Trump administration suspending the Green Card filings from his company along with seven other tech majors in an exclusive interview with Politico in Dublin and warned that this could cripple the US tech sector for over a generation. He said it was ironic that the White House chose to target his company’s foreign workers on the same day it gave a medal to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was once an H-1B visa holder from India.“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. “And those five individuals, if you put them and their companies together, have companies that have a market value equal to more than 25% of the market value of the total S&P 500.”“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.”Smith said JD Vance‘s allegations of visa fraud are completely off base and that someone must have failed to inform the vice president of Microsoft’s number accurately, because a majority of Microsoft’s Green Card applicants are long-time employees and not new hires. The company had issued a statement immediately after JD Vance announced the PERM ban on eight tech companies.
What Microsoft said in its statement
“We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, 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. 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. They are not new arrivals to our country,” Microsoft said.“Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category. We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and 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,” the statement added.
No salary discrepancy
Brad Smith said the company hired 9,000 US-born workers last year which the narrative set by the White House missed. “We will stand by our record,” said Smith. “And I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture.”Smith said the crackdown should worry US that they would not be able to attract top tech talent anymore. “I think we should all be worried about 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,” he said.
