What the PERM Suspension Means for Workers at Each Green Card Stage

For an H-1B engineer at Microsoft, Infosys or the six other companies named on Thursday, the loud part of the announcement matters less than a quiet one: which immigration form already carries your name.

Nothing announced ends a worker's H-1B status, a spouse's H-4 status or an existing work permit. What stops is the green-card line, at different points for different people. For many the damage is delay. For workers whose employer never filed the first application, it can be a wall.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the Labor Department had suspended Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, HCL and Capgemini from the Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM), refusing their new applications and halting pending ones. The rule it most likely relied on requires written notice and caps a first suspension at 180 days, yet no written notice has been published and no end date set.

The announcement came at a Fraud Task Force news conference in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller alongside. Vance named Microsoft. Sonderling read out the other seven and said the department would not accept any new or process any pending applications involving them.

It came in a week of pressure on foreign-worker programs that also produced the proposed $70,000 OPT fee, alongside J-1 investigations at nine universities. Blanche said the Justice Department is "actively investigating" companies that favor foreign workers. Nothing said Thursday established wrongdoing by any of the eight; these are allegations, and investigations are ongoing.

PERM is where most employment-based green cards begin. The employer tests the U.S. labor market and shows the Labor Department that no qualified U.S. worker is available and that wages won't be undercut. Then U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) decides the employer's I-140 petition, and the worker later files for the green card itself.

"So if the H-1B visa is how the people get into the country, the PERM program is how they stay in the United States to begin with."

JD Vance, Vice President

So the blow lands on the green-card track, and the visa stands. His accusation concerns the labor test: employers, he said, "put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper," report no response, and use it to replace Americans.

The clock that keeps running

The suspension stops the Labor Department's piece of the pipeline, not every clock attached to it.

Your stage	What the suspension does	The rule's clock
Recruitment done, PERM not filed	Can't file with these employers	Mandatory recruitment must be 30–180 days old at filing (20 CFR 656.17)
PERM pending at DOL	Processing stopped; no I-140 on that case for now	AC21 one-year extensions run 365 days from PERM filing (8 CFR 214.2(h)(13)(iii)(D))
PERM certified, no I-140 yet	Announcement silent; I-140 goes to USCIS	Certification expires 180 days after it was granted (20 CFR 656.30)
I-140 approved	No announced cancellation	Priority date retained; three-year extensions if stuck behind the per-country cap
I-485 pending	Not automatically terminated	After 180 days, AC21 job portability to a same or similar job

The biggest fact is easy to miss. The AC21 one-year H-1B extension past six years is available "if at least 365 days have elapsed since" a labor certification was filed, not approved. Extensions run until a final decision to deny, revoke, approve or close the case, and a processing suspension is none of those. Read plainly, a pending PERM older than a year still supports an extension, and a younger one keeps maturing while it sits in the queue.

That makes the hardest-hit group the workers whose PERM was never filed. Nothing can be filed for them with these employers, and recruitment older than 180 days goes stale, so a finished job search may need rerunning. A worker near year six with nothing filed a year earlier has no runway through this employer. The way out is in the H-1B extension rules: the new petitioner "need not be the employer that filed" the PERM, so another company's PERM, once a year old, can carry the extension.

Pending-PERM workers still face what Reddy Neumann Brown, the firm founded by Rahul Reddy, calls "the most immediate green-card problem": no path to an I-140 on that case for now. Their priority date, their place in line, was set when the department accepted the case (8 CFR 204.5(d)), and nothing announced purports to change it. The extension reading carries a caution: the firm says it has "already noticed problems involving certain companies where H-1B extensions are not being approved as routinely as before," which "should not be confused with an officially announced blanket extension ban."

The quietest risk belongs to certified PERMs. A certification expires "if not filed in support of a Form I-140 petition … within 180 calendar days." The announcement was silent on certified cases, and the I-140 goes to USCIS. A worker certified in the spring should be counting days now.

An approved I-140 passes its priority date to later petitions unless revoked for fraud or similar grounds (8 CFR 204.5(e)). Workers held back only by the per-country cap can extend H-1B status three years at a time. A properly filed green-card application (I-485) is not automatically terminated, Reddy Neumann Brown says, and once it has been pending 180 days, AC21 job portability still applies. H-4 work permits, which rest on the principal's approved I-140 or AC21 extension (8 CFR 214.2(h)(9)(iv)), follow the principal's stage.

India's Ministry of External Affairs, on Friday, Oct. 9, drew the line carefully: the suspension does not, by itself, affect the validity of existing H-1B visas or the status of H-1B visa holders and their dependents, though there could be some impact on the permanent-residency/Green Card process. "By itself" carries the weight.

How long it lasts depends on a rule the government has not named. WR Immigration points to the Labor Department's suspension rule, 20 CFR 656.31(b), which lets the department "suspend processing of any permanent labor certification application involving such employer" while another agency investigates possible fraud or willful misrepresentation, "until completion of any investigation and/or judicial proceedings." Ellis says reports point to the same section.

The rule has limits. Suspension "may last initially for up to 180 days," which, if the department is using 656.31(b), ends Tuesday, April 6, 2027, for the seven firms suspended Oct. 8; Cognizant's September suspension would reach 180 days around March 7, 2027. After that, absent an indictment, the National Certifying Officer "may resume processing some or all of the applications, or may extend the suspension." The department "shall provide written notification to the employer" unless investigators ask otherwise in writing. The text speaks of suspending processing; it does not mention refusing new filings, which the administration also announced. Debarment, the heavier tool, is a bar "for a reasonable period of no more than three years" with a written notice and appeal rights. None has been announced.

Vance said the suspension will "last as long as it needs to" and that the administration has "a number of tools to suspend it indefinitely." SHRM calls it indefinite. Cognizant already knows the pattern: on Tuesday, Sept. 8, D'Esposito announced that Cognizant's and Cloudera's PERM filings were suspended and posted "Handcuffs await." on X, 30 days before the other seven followed.

What the record says about the math

Vance's case against Microsoft rested on a ratio: it laid off "6,000 American workers" last year while it "benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards."

"If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."

JD Vance, Vice President

Add the visas to the green cards, divide by the layoffs, and the ratio is 1.55. But per SHRM, the USCIS data Vance cited show 6,258 H-1B approvals and 3,157 PERM filings. The "green cards" are step one of three, not cards anyone received.

Microsoft's statement said that of "approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications" last fiscal year, 80% "were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people." The rest went to people "already legally in the United States." Run those figures the same way: about 4,800 renewals or status changes and about 1,200 new hires, already in the country. Set against the layoffs, that is roughly 0.2 new hires per layoff.

Neither number is clean: one side counts approvals, the other applications, and neither has published the list. But Vance's ratio adds renewals of people already on payroll to first-step paperwork and divides by layoffs. Neither number shows who replaced whom.

Sonderling said "these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers" since 2009; The Wire, republished by the Kathmandu Post, reported it as referring to the six outsourcers, while Ellis attributes the related H-1B and certification totals to all eight. Vance's claims that H-1B workers earn "$20,000 less," and outsourcing hires "$48,000 less," came with no supporting data in reports of the briefing. Microsoft, No. 5 among U.S. H-1B employers per KOMO, says it pays H-1B staff the same as others in comparable work. The same day, President Trump gave CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

In India, the sting was diplomatic first:

"Resorting to terminology that carries painful historical and colonial legacy connotations is deeply offensive."

India's Ministry of External Affairs

The commercial exposure is smaller than headlines implied. TCS, with 31 U.S. offices and delivery centers, said its PERM applications "were in single digits in the last two years." ICICI Securities said Indian IT firms accounted for less than 2% of PERM applications filed between October 2024 and September 2025, Reuters reported. The likelier heavy exposure, by inference, is at Microsoft and Adobe. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said, "You don't fix a broken immigration system by taking a hammer to legal immigration," and Vance replied, in a post quoted by PTI, that "'Socialism' apparently means fighting like hell to ensure megacorporations have a never-ending flow of cheap labour."

Reddy Neumann Brown's advice: "Do not panic, but do not ignore the announcement. Determine exactly where you are in the immigration process." That means pulling a few dates:

• The I-94 end date and when the six-year H-1B limit runs out.
• The PERM filing date and the day it passes 365 days.
• For a certified PERM, the certification date and the 180-day I-140 deadline.
• The I-140 approval date, and whether 180 days have passed since.
• Whether another employer could file a PERM, or an EB-2 National Interest Waiver or EB-1A self-petition could work; Ellis notes these need strong evidence and still follow the visa bulletin.

The rule the Labor Department most likely used says the employer "shall" receive written notification and limits the first round to 180 days, a window that would close April 6, 2027, for the seven firms named Oct. 8, if that rule applies. The vice president talks of "indefinitely." Only one of those positions exists on paper, and it is not the one workers heard on Thursday. Until the notice surfaces, they are planning their next year around a press conference.