Trump honours Microsoft’s CEO after Vance drops H-1B visa hammer on company

President Donald Trump celebrated tech billionaires such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, only to get upstaged hours earlier when Vice President JD Vance announced that Microsoft was being suspended from a programme that allows companies to apply for green cards for skilled foreign workers with H-1B visas.

The crackdown on Microsoft came under Vance’s purview as the head of a fraud task force, but the targeting revealed the tension between the companies powering US economic growth and the administration’s efforts to reduce immigration that it says has come at the expense of American workers. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance told a news conference.

He said the company had abused the visa system. “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

Vance said Microsoft last year fired 6,000 US workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.

The tech company based in Redmond, Washington, has 223,000 employees worldwide. Microsoft has not commented on the allegations. In presenting National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella, the president took a more flattering approach that praised his work at Microsoft and made no statements about the company’s hiring of foreign workers. “For more than three decades, Satya Nadella has been 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,” Trump said. Of the six tech leaders who received an award for scientific and technological achievement from the president, five are immigrants.

The president gave the National Medal of Science to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Lisa Su, CEO of the semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices.

Each of them was born overseas - South Africa for Musk, Russia for Brin and Taiwan for Huang and Su.

In addition to Nadella, Trump also gave the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, who has sponsored the government’s special investment accounts for children known as Trump Accounts. Dell was born in Texas, while Nadella immigrated from India.

Trump called the group of billionaires “national treasures,” comparing them to his uncle, John Trump, an electrical engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received the National Medal of Science in 1983.

“Such a big day in the world of science and the world of technology - this is the biggest day there is,” Trump said. “You’re going to go down in the annals of history as being great.”a