In a recent outburst, U.S. Vice President JD Vance slammed Microsoft for allegedly favoring foreign workers over American talent, igniting widespread controversy.
Of approximately 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, the company said, 80% were extensions or changes of status for existing employees. The remaining filings concerned people already legally present in the US, who chose to work for Microsoft; the company said these employees amounted to about 1% of its US workforce. or that every H-1B employer complies with the law, they do challenge the simple Vance arithmetic in which 6,000 layoffs plus 6,000 visa applications automatically equal 6,000 replacements of American workers deserving “American jobs While the figures do not establish that microsoft never displaces American workers. ” There is another inconvenient detail for Vance’s argument; Nadella himself immigrated from India and built his career in the US, going on to become microsoft’s CEO – only the third after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer – in 2014 after joining the company in 1992. Microsoft has grown more than 12x (market cap growing from $ 300 billion to almost $ 4 trillion) in the time Nadella has helmed the company and many American retirement accounts have grown on the ballast provided by such tech giants. Recalling his early days at Amazon in an H-1B role, Mathur wrote on X that he was part of the initial team that built Amazon Web Services (AWS), which he described as now contributing more than 60% of Amazon’s profits.
That was one of the barbs ricocheting around social media after US vice president JD Vance accused microsoft of replacing american workers with “foreign indentured servants” – shortly before his boss honored the company’s India-born CEO, Satya Nadella, at the white house. Microsoft also said it pays H-1B employees the same as other employees doing comparable work, and that its wages rank among the highest in the technology sector. “Good luck building companies and wealth without these ‘indentured servants’,” he scoffed.
TOI Correspondent from Washington: “His in-laws were indentured servants and his wife is an anchor baby. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s response directly challenges the impression that its H-1B figures represent thousands of new foreign hires. These were not applications to bring in new workers. it is a reminder that the immigrant talent pool Vance is attacking has also helped produce the very American corporate success he wants to defend While career is hardly proof that every visa holder is indispensable. Among the most pointed responses to Vance’s slight came from Shobhit Mathur, Co-founder and Vice chancellor of Rishihood university and IIT alum. His post’s central argument was simple: around a hundred H-1B holders were part of that early team, and the company’s subsequent transformation would have looked very different without them. The answer may be a mixture of policy and politics. The administration has already taken steps to tighten the H-1B program, which even some of its supporters say had been gamed by some operators, and the latest action gives Vance an opportunity to demonstrate that the crackdown is reaching powerful corporations, not just migrants at the bottom of the labour market. Naming Microsoft and suspending its access to a green-card process creates a visible target, although Vance and co have conspicuously let amazon, which processes more H1Bs than Microsoft, off the hook.
The timing of Vance’s broadside has prompted another question: why is the administration escalating its campaign now, rather than earlier in Trump’s term, or for that matter, during his first term?