PERM Green Card Suspension: Who Is Hit and Why

The PERM green card suspension is, according to Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, a decision by the United States Labor Department, announced on 8 October 2026, to stop handling permanent labor certification applications that involve eight employers: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. News outlets call it the Microsoft green card suspension. PERM is the first government step in most employer-sponsored green cards, so the pause freezes that step for the workers these firms sponsor. We wrote this on 16 October 2026 in answer to a news item we saw trending on 15 and 16 October. It explains how the process works and what the record shows so far. We found no primary Labor Department document announcing the action, so what follows rests on what officials said at a news conference as reported by the press, and on a law-firm analysis. The allegations are the government's, not findings, and Microsoft disputes some of them. It is not legal or immigration advice, and several key facts are still unconfirmed.

What is the PERM green card suspension?

In TechCrunch's report (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/us-bars-microsoft-adobe-and-major-it-firms-from-green-card-program-for-skilled-foreign-workers/) of the White House news conference, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government will not accept new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these eight companies¹.¹ Vice President JD Vance, who announced the step, framed it as a response to alleged abuse of the system.²

Public explanations are limited. A legal analysis from the firm Meltzer Hellrung says Sonderling tied the Microsoft and Adobe suspensions to active federal investigations, and that these are allegations rather than findings; the agencies and the subject matter have not been named.³ In the sources we opened, we found no published finding of wrongdoing against any of the eight.

Both sides have put numbers on the table. Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards².² Sonderling said the suspended companies received more than 230,000 H-1B visas and more than 100,000 PERM certifications since 2009.⁴ Microsoft answered that about 6,000 H-1B filings in its last fiscal year were mostly for people already working for it: 80 percent were to extend or change the status of existing employees, and the rest were new-hire filings equal to about 1 percent of its American workforce.² These are claims by the parties. We could not check them against a government dataset, so we report them as claims. Al Jazeera adds that Meta, Amazon and Google were not among the companies suspended.⁴

What is PERM labor certification and how does it work?

The Labor Department describes PERM, short for Permanent Employment Certification (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/permanent), as the process that lets an employer hire a foreign worker for permanent work in the United States. The employer generally needs a certified labor certification before it files an immigrant petition with the immigration agency USCIS. To certify, the department must find that there are not enough able, willing, qualified and available American workers, and that hiring the foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed American workers.⁵ In plain terms, it is a labor-market test run before a green card is possible.

The employer, not the worker, files the application on Form ETA 9089, and the filing date becomes the worker's place in the queue, called the priority date. After the department certifies, the employer sends the certified form with a petition on Form I-140 to USCIS, and the certification expires if that does not happen within 180 days.⁵ Before applying, the employer must advertise the job in the United States.² This is why the labor certification process is a gate controlled by the company: a suspension stops the gate for every worker that company wants to sponsor.

Even without a suspension the line is long. The department's processing page, as of 5 October 2026, showed analyst review at applications with a priority date of December 2025⁶, roughly ten months of waiting before a decision.⁶

That annual limit is the real bottleneck. USCIS says (https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers) approximately 140,000 employment-based immigrant visas are available each fiscal year, for workers and their spouses and children, across five preference categories.⁷ Al Jazeera reports that no single country may take more than 7 percent of these cards a year, and that nearly one million Indians on work visas are stuck in the employment-based backlog, 79 percent of a total backlog of about 1.25 million people.⁴ So a PERM pause lands on workers who may already face very long waits.

How long can a PERM suspension last?

The department has not said. Reporting, including the Meltzer Hellrung analysis, notes that it has not cited a regulation for the action.³ The rule most often named is 20 C.F.R. 656.31(b)⁸, which lets the department suspend processing of applications involving a party under investigation for possible fraud or willful misrepresentation, until the investigation or court proceedings end. A first suspension under that provision may last initially for up to 180 days, after which the National Certifying Officer may resume processing or extend the suspension.⁸ The department is to notify the employer in writing unless the investigating agency asks otherwise (see the regulation text (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/part-656/section-656.31)).⁸ Vance said the suspensions would last as long as they need to.⁴

A suspension is not a penalty with a finding behind it. The same regulation separately allows debarment, a ban of no more than three years that must be issued in writing with reasons and appeal rights.⁸ If fraud is found, the certifying officer decides each pending application on its merits and may deny it.⁸ Nothing we found shows that either step has been taken against these companies.

Does the PERM suspension affect H-1B visas?

Not directly, as far as the announcement is reported. H-1B is a temporary work visa for highly skilled jobs, with an annual cap of 85,000 new visas excluding renewals, according to Al Jazeera.⁴ The Associated Press describes PERM as the program through which companies sponsor green cards for workers on H-1B visas.² The two are linked, which is why Vance's figures mix both programs, but a PERM suspension stops the permanent-residence step, not the visa itself.

It also arrived alongside other measures. The AP reports that a day earlier the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $70,000 fee for schools for each international student working through Optional Practical Training, and that Vance named nine universities for possible investigation over J-1 visa fraud.² We have not examined those measures here.

Does skilled-worker immigration lower wages?

It depends on who is competing with whom, and the PERM test was built around that question: certification requires that hiring a foreign worker does not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similar American workers.⁵ In a simple supply-and-demand picture, more people able to do a job pushes wages for close substitutes down, while workers who complement them, and the firms that grow because they can hire, may gain. Which effect dominates varies by occupation and by how easily jobs can be filled. For the general forces behind pay, see our guide to why wages rise (https://therealigned.com/story/why-wages-rise), and for how scarce labor has pushed pay up before, our piece on the Black Death and wages (https://therealigned.com/story/black-death-and-wages).

Firms weigh these costs against what a worker earns for them; our explainer on how startups actually make money (https://therealigned.com/story/how-startups-actually-make-money) shows how that arithmetic looks from the inside. Here are the strongest versions of the two cases, as their supporters would make them.

What do we not know about the Microsoft green card suspension?

• Whether and when the department will publish a written notice. The Meltzer Hellrung analysis said that none existed as of its publication, and that the details rested on a news conference and media reports.
• How long the suspension will last, and what would lift it.
• Which agencies are investigating, and what they are examining.
• How many pending applications and workers are affected by the freeze.
• Whether the suspension affects certifications already approved.