Ok. So, yesterday JD Vance stood up and said Microsoft will not get a single new or pending PERM processed, and neither will Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, please be kind, since I read immigration law as a layman, not as a lawyer.

Vance accused all eight of fraud through H-1B plus PERM, with Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling beside him saying Labor will simply not process any new or pending Permanent Labor Certification applications from them. In plain English; the company can still employ the H-1B worker for now, but it cannot take the next step that lets that worker stay permanently, which freezes the whole queue behind them.

PERM is the precursor step to most employment green cards, and Labor certified more than 130,000 of them in FY2025 across ten categories, while H-1B itself stays capped at 85,000 a year with 65,000 plus 20,000 for US masters. So PERM is the wider funnel, and blocking 8 employers there hits harder than blocking visas at the border.

Vance’s receipts were aimed at Microsoft first with about 6,000 layoffs set against about 6,800 H-1B filings in the same period, and the line that Microsoft replaced Americans with quote foreign indentured servants unquote because a fired H-1B worker has to leave. Sonderling added the visa-mills line about Microsoft and universities flooding the country, and last month Labor separately proposed killing the 60-day grace period entirely which would make fired status end almost immediately.

Microsoft’s reply is worth keeping on record because both sides agree on the numbers and disagree on what they mean. Their spokeswoman said the vast majority of their US staff are Americans out of 200,000-plus worldwide, and 80% of last fiscal’s H-1B filings were for existing workers, not new hires, and paid at the same level as Americans, with outside data from Ellis putting median H-1B pay at Microsoft at $155,000.

And the theatre around it was wild even by 2026 standards, because Satya Nadella was at the White House the same day receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from Trump, alongside Musk and Jensen Huang and Lisa Su and Brin and Dell, while Vance said quote no company in the US has abused this system more than Microsoft unquote about the company whose CEO had just been garlanded. Its so sad to see talent get a medal and a freeze in the same building on the same afternoon.

Foreign STEM workers went from 1.2 million in 2000 to almost 2.5 million in 2019 while overall STEM employment grew only 44.5%, and inside computer and math jobs the foreign share went from 17.7% to 26.1%. IT’s share of H-1Bs went from 32% in FY 2003 to over 65% in recent years, and 7 in 10 approvals most years go to Indians.

American companies could not get enough kids to do engineering and then stay to build software, because the population is smaller and the demographic pyramid is narrower and a 22-year-old in Ohio had finance pulling at him alongside law and medicine and content creation, while a 22-year-old in Hyderabad had one clear escalator which was code and a visa queue.

For 25 years that worked because the doorkeepers held — the CS degree and the LeetCode round and the visa officer and the onsite interview in Bangalore which decided who got to touch production code.

That is why this PERM freeze lands differently than 2017’s threats did. In 2017 America still had a quantity problem which only Indians could solve, because somebody had to type the CRUD and the ETL and the Selenium suites. In 2026 an American product manager who never cleared FizzBuzz can describe a workflow in English and get working software back before lunch, which means the shortage came from missing hands that outsourcing could rent by the hour, and now those hands are free.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every small town in Texas had the engineering strength that only Redmond and Infosys Mysore had ten years ago? That is what just happened, without anyone needing a visa.

Honestly, I think Vance just pushed the door shut after the room had already emptied, because the trust math is broken even if this freeze is lifted tomorrow.

Why would a kid from Bagdogra or Belgaum spend 4 years grinding DSA and then 8 years in a green-card queue and $15,000 in legal fees to live with the fear that one Thursday presser freezes his file with no hearing, when Microsoft and Amazon themselves emailed staff last September saying do not travel, and when Bangalore and Hyderabad now have GCCs paying Rs 40-60 lakhs for the same work without leaving home?

I unfortunately haven’t been blessed with a good gut for politics, but I know engineers, and engineers do not return to a platform that deploys breaking changes to their lives at midnight.

And this spreads wherever technology touches the job, which is everywhere. The hospital waiting rooms I sat in taught me how much of a radiologist’s day is pattern-matching with dictation strapped on, and how much of a lawyer’s day is first-drafting, and how much of an accountant’s day is reconciliation, and all of that runs on the same English-in, artifact-out loop that code just went through. The visa was the first gate to fall because tech lived closest to the model, but back-office finance and support and testing and media ops follow the same path.

Technology always works for good and the leader always claims to be right, so watch who taxes the new gate next with agent seats and token meters and skill stores.

Its time we start exporting technology to the world, built by kids who stay home because the work is here, and the country that learns that fastest wins the next decade.

Tweet to me the first job in your family that AI already unbundled. I am @troysk704.