Green card filings stall for engineers at Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcers

The first person to feel this is an engineer employed by one of the six outsourcers and placed on a client's team on an H-1B ^[1]. Her employer was about to file the labour certification that has to come before a green card petition ^[8]. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government would accept no new or pending certification applications involving the suspended companies ^[18]. Her current visa does not change, according to TNW ^[17].

The word "pending" is where the reports split. TNW reported that the suspension covers new filings and that cases already filed or approved are not cancelled ^[17]. Both accounts fit a hold: under 20 CFR 656.31 the department can hold applications until an investigation finishes ^[9]. The department has published no end date, and none of the three reports describes any change to H-1B petitions or to client contracts ^[14].

The case made from the podium was about fraud and displaced Americans. Vice President JD Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying it could not find qualified American employees ^[4]. He said nearly 1,000 of its 3,682 PERM applications were for the same positions ^[5]. That is about 27% of its filings, on his numbers ^[15]. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft," Vance said ^[6]. Microsoft and Adobe did not immediately respond to requests for comment ^[7].

The action is narrower than the speech. The department stopped taking certification filings from eight employers while an inspector general's fraud investigation runs, and no criminal charges have been brought ^[3]. That investigation is nationwide. It opened in July, and in September it held new filings from Cognizant and the data firm Cloudera, TNW reported ^[10]. Cloudera is not an IT outsourcer.

The comfortable assumption on the client side is that immigration is the vendor's problem, because the vendor is the employer. The engineer on the account sees something else: a green card plan tied to an employer that cannot file, and no date for when it can. I'd expect the people furthest along that path to start answering recruiters from employers that can still file. Replacing them costs more if the Department of Homeland Security adopts the $103,265 fee it proposed in August for each new capped H-1B ^[11]. Moving the work to another vendor is slow as well. Capgemini's research institute found last month that 36% of large organisations would need more than a year to leave a critical provider ^[13]. Capgemini, one of the suspended six, takes 29% of group revenue from North America, its fastest-growing region ^[12].

A two-by-two sorts the exposure account by account. One axis is whether the person's employer is on Thursday's list ^[1][2] or September's ^[10]. The other is whether that person's plan to stay in the role depends on a labour certification filing within the next year. Yes on both is a retention risk now. A listed employer with no filing planned leaves the work running, since the visa holds ^[17]. An unlisted employer with a filing planned can still file today, on a list that went from two names in September to eight on Thursday ^[16]. No on both changes nothing. The grid fills in from one number per vendor: how many people on the account have a certification planned or pending with a suspended employer.