Microsoft has responded to the criticism that it fired American employees to hire foreign cheap labor saying that H-1B applications are no way related to the recent job eliminations and many employees on H-1Bs also lost their jobs. The statement comes amid an intense debate over Microsoft’s announcement of 9,000 layoffs while the company reportedly made 4712 applications for H-1Bs. “Our H-1B applications are in no way related to the recent job eliminations in part because employees on H-1B’s also lost their roles. In the past 12 months, 78% of the petitions we filed were extensions for existing employees and not new employees coming to the U.S.,” the company said in a statement emailed to CFO Dive by a spokesperson.Vice President JD Vance recently slammed Microsoft and he said it makes no sense to him that companies fire Americans and then claim that they can’t find workers in America and bring in foreign workers. “You see some big tech companies where they’ll lay off 9,000 workers, and then they’ll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. And I sort of wonder; that doesn’t totally make sense to me,” he said.“That displacement and that math worries me a bit. And what the president has said, he said very clearly: We want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies and so forth. But I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, ‘We can’t find workers here in America.’ That’s a bulls**t story,” he said.The H-1B visa program that allows companies to hire foreign workers has emerged as a contentious issue while the Donald Trump administration is planning a major overhaul of the program. H-1B runs the Silicon Valley but this goes against Trump’s promised America First policy prompting MAGA activists to call for an end to this program.
