US green-card freeze singles out Microsoft, Adobe and six IT services firms

The employer list is the term to study. Six of the eight companies named are IT services firms, and two, Microsoft and Adobe, are technology companies ^[18]. PERM, in place since 2005, is started by the employer and not by the worker ^[16][17]. A company on the list therefore closes that route for its own foreign staff. The Labor Department's job-by-job test certifies that no qualified US workers are available and that wages and conditions will not be undercut ^[10]. For the named firms, that test is not run at all ^[3].

Senior officials said the firms used the program to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labour ^[2]. Vance aimed his remarks at one name. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," he said ^[7].

The prior step was a price. A one-time $100,000 charge on new H-1B petitions ^[8] would have let any employer keep hiring if it paid. The PERM suspension has no price at which a named firm gets back in ^[3]. Washington has gone from taxing foreign hiring to choosing which employers may sponsor permanent residents, and the eight on the list now compete for staff with three large employers that can still offer sponsorship ^[5][19].

Most of the cost lands on hiring. Many IT firms employ hundreds of thousands of workers who start on temporary visas such as the H-1B and later seek permanent residency ^[11]. Candidates abroad often take a job partly for that path, and workers at the named firms will now spend longer on temporary status ^[12]. Ahmet Gulek, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, said that without permanent residency some talented workers will leave and some will not come ^[15].

In my view the evidence supports a narrower cost than a general rise in labour costs for outsourcers and their clients. What it shows is a hiring handicap at eight firms against rivals that can still sponsor, plus a queue of pending files that will not be processed ^[19][3]. Delivery risk for the services firms' clients is plausible. But the reporting does not include how many PERM applications those firms file or have pending, or any wage or contract figures, so that risk cannot be sized.

The counter-case comes from Chad Sparber, director of the Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs at Colgate University. "You think that foreign talent competes with Americans within our borders, they'll certainly compete with Americans by working abroad," he said ^[14]. If the work moves offshore, the services firms keep delivering and the loss shows up in US hiring. The view is wrong if the named firms turn out to be heavy PERM users whose US project staff depend on the route, in which case costs reach their clients.