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Indian tech workers in limbo as US suspends Infosys, Wipro and HCL from Green Card scheme
Oct 09, 2026
Highlights
- The US has suspended Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, plus Microsoft and Adobe, from the PERM Green Card programme.
- No new applications will be accepted, and pending ones will not be processed, according to US labour secretary Keith Sonderling.
- Indian workers face longer waits in an already severe backlog, and those near the six-year H-1B limit are most at risk.
THOUSANDS of Indian technology professionals in the US face fresh uncertainty over their hopes of permanent residency after the Trump administration suspended some of India's biggest IT firms from a key Green Card programme.
US labour secretary Keith Sonderling announced on Thursday (8) that six outsourcing companies had been barred from the Permanent Labor Certification Program, known as PERM.
"I am hereby suspending from the Permanent Labour Certification Programme some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini," Sonderling said.
Microsoft and Adobe were also suspended, which Sonderling attributed to multiple active federal investigations. He said his department would neither accept new applications nor process pending ones involving the companies. No end date for the suspension has been announced.
The move was announced by vice president JD Vance, Sonderling and attorney general Todd Blanche under the US Anti-Fraud Task Force. It widens action taken last month, when Cognizant alone was suspended from the programme.
Indian-born workers accounted for about 71 per cent of approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2024, and 65 per cent of H-1B workers approved in 2023 held computer-related jobs. Indian professionals make up the bulk of skilled US visa holders.
Indian IT companies saw a 70 per cent fall in initial-employment H-1B approvals between FY2015 and FY2025, according to an NFAP analysis of USCIS data, with the top seven firms getting just 4,573 new approvals in FY2025.
Why it matters for Indian workers
PERM is the step through which US employers usually obtain labour certification before sponsoring a foreign worker for an employment-based Green Card. The date a PERM application is accepted generally becomes the worker's "priority date", their place in the queue.
That queue is already long for Indians. In the US State Department's September 2026 Visa Bulletin, the EB-2 category for India was listed as "unavailable" for final action, while the EB-3 final-action date was January 1, 2014.
Employees at the suspended firms who have not yet reached the PERM stage cannot now secure a priority date. Those nearing the usual six-year limit on an H-1B visa could be hit hardest, because extensions beyond six years can depend on a labour certification being filed in time.
The administration's case
The administration says foreign workers hired by these firms were filling jobs that should have gone to Americans.
"We are ending the fraud that has fuelled reliance on foreign labour," Sonderling said. "President Trump's Department of Labour will ensure that American businesses now look first to the most talented workforce in the world, and that's the American worker."
He said the companies had, since 2009, received more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labour certifications. He described these as jobs taken from American workers.
Vance singled out Microsoft. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft," he said. He claimed the company laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 while filing 3,682 PERM applications, nearly 1,000 of them for the same positions.
Vance also called foreign workers on H-1B visas "foreign indentured servants" and described companies using the programme as "visa mills".
Backlash
Indian American congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, whose Washington state constituency is home to Microsoft, criticised the move.
"You don't fix a broken immigration system by taking a hammer to legal immigration," she said, arguing that targeting PERM undermines legal immigration and weakens America's ability to innovate.
Vance responded with a dig at the progressive Democrat: "'Socialism' apparently means fighting like hell to ensure megacorporations have a never-ending flow of cheap labour."
Wider crackdown
Vance also announced an investigation into the use of J-1 research scholar visas at nine universities, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Caltech, claiming they were being used to undercut the wages of American researchers.
The suspensions follow growing US scrutiny of the H-1B and PERM programmes. The administration has not said how long the suspension will last or whether it could add more firms.
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