US Green-card freeze tests Indian IT yet again
Washington’s suspension of green-card processing for eight companies, including TCS and Infosys, raises questions over due process and election-year politics
On Thursday, the Trump administration barred eight companies — Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini — from the Permanent Labour Certification programme, PERM, the step most employers must clear before sponsoring a green card. The Labour Department will accept no new applications from them and process none already pending. Existing H-1B visas and approved petitions are untouched.
Washington’s stated reason is fraud. A Labour Department inspector general investigation, launched in July alongside the White House Fraud Task Force, alleges abuse of the H-1B and PERM systems. Yet, at the announcement, no charges had been disclosed against any of them, and no specific regulation was cited. A suspension is an accusation, not a verdict.
Politics is hard to miss. The announcement came under four weeks before the 3 November midterms, with Vice President JD Vance telling Microsoft to hire American workers and pointing to its 6,000 layoffs in 2025. Crackdowns on foreign hiring play well with voters anxious about jobs, and outsourcing firms make convenient villains. The enforcement may be genuine; its timing is electoral, and its slogan of hiring Americans first suits a campaign season.
For Indian IT, the corporate damage is smaller than the headlines suggest. TCS says its PERM filings were in single digits over two years. Nasscom notes that few H-1B workers reach permanent residency this way. IT stocks rose on Friday, helped by TCS’s quarterly results. The Indian majors built their model on temporary visas and offshore delivery, not green cards. The real casualties are individual professionals: engineers mid-queue whose employers can no longer file, in a backlog already punishing for Indians. Approved certifications remain usable; the rest are stalled. Many will switch employers; some will come home.
A legal remedy exists. Section 656.31(b) of the Labour Department’s regulations, the likely basis, lets it suspend PERM processing while an employer is under investigation for possible fraud, initially for up to 180 days, extendable while the inquiry continues. That presupposes a genuine investigation of each company. If the Department cannot show one, the firms could challenge the suspensions in federal court under the Administrative Procedure Act as arbitrary and unexplained. Some immigration lawyers expect exactly such litigation.
The way forward is threefold. First, localise: TCS plans 15,000 American hires over five years, and its peers should match it. Second, tighten compliance: the Cloudera case shows PERM recruitment must mirror ordinary hiring. Third, diversify — towards Europe, the Gulf and AI-led services — so no single Washington press conference can unsettle a $315 billion industry. New Delhi should also press Nasscom’s point that immigration and skilled-talent mobility are distinct issues. Indian IT has survived every visa scare by adapting. It will adapt again. But it should demand that evidence, not the election calendar, decides when this freeze ends.