Washington has locked the wrong door

Posted on: 12 October 2026

On Thursday 8 October the American vice-president, JD Vance, announced that the Department of Labor would stop accepting and stop processing PERM applications from eight companies. Microsoft and Adobe are on the list, along with six of the big IT services firms: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. PERM is the certificate by which an employer shows that no American worker was available for a given job, and it is the first compulsory step towards almost every green card obtained through employment. Asked how long the suspension would last, Vance said as long as it needs to.

The charge against Microsoft rests on two numbers set side by side, about 6,000 American employees laid off while the company obtained 6,300 H-1B visas. Microsoft answered within hours that 80 per cent of those filings were for people already on its payroll. I cannot say who is right and I suspect that for the moment nobody outside Redmond can either, since the Labor Secretary, Keith Sonderling, cited several active federal investigations as the reason and gave no detail about any of them.

British readers have heard the slogan before in their own accent. Gordon Brown promised British jobs for British workers at the Labour conference in September 2007, and sixteen months later the phrase came back at him on placards outside the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire, where several hundred contractors walked out on 28 January 2009 because an Italian firm, IREM, had brought its own Italian and Portuguese workforce and put it up on barges in the docks. The stock reply to that kind of politics, in Britain as in Switzerland where I live, is that the locals cannot or will not do the job. It was my first thought this time as well and it does not work here, because the people Microsoft let go were writing software the day before. That is why Vance picked the target. The rule he is invoking existed already, come to that, since the PERM form asks the employer whether it has made anyone redundant in that occupation in the previous six months and, if it has, obliges it to consider those people first.

So it is worth looking at what exactly has been blocked. The H-1B is a temporary visa and it ties the worker to the company that applied for it. A green card does the opposite, because a permanent resident can change employer and bargain over pay as an equal, which means that a company starting PERM for an employee is giving up its hold on them. On the published counts I could find, Microsoft files more of these applications than anyone in the country. Infosys in 2025 lodged 5,737 filings for temporary visas and none for permanent residence, which is nothing new: Ron Hira of Howard University counted seven workers sponsored for a green card by Infosys in 2013 and none by Tata, at a time when those two were the largest users of the H-1B. Cognizant is the exception among the outsourcers, because it files a good many. The suspension therefore closes the passage from temporary to settled and leaves the rotating visa open, which is the very instrument that anyone worried about cheap foreign labour ought to be looking at first.

Anyone who has sponsored a Skilled Worker in Britain will recognise the shape. The visa needs a licensed sponsor behind the job, and what releases the worker from that is indefinite leave to remain.

Then there are the durations. An H-1B lasts six years at most and can be extended beyond that only if the residence application was filed at least 365 days earlier. Those whose application is already lodged ought to stay covered even while it sits unprocessed. Those hired in the last few years, whose application never started, now face a deadline with two ways out, a competitor that is not on the list or an office of Microsoft's own outside the United States.

For the second of those there is a measurement. Britta Glennon, at the Wharton School, matched visa data against data on the foreign affiliates of American multinationals. When the H-1B cap was cut in 2004, the companies that depended most on those workers increased employment at their foreign affiliates by 27 per cent more than the others did, and the most internationalised of them hired 0.9 people abroad for every visa refused. The countries were Canada, India and China, and the example the study gives is Microsoft in Vancouver, three hours by road from Seattle. Glennon measures caps on visas and not PERM, so her work says something about how companies react to a prohibition. Nothing more.

By the way, the stock photograph the Canadian channel BNN Bloomberg used for the story shows Vance boarding Air Force Two at Emmen air base, in the canton of Lucerne, on 22 June. It has nothing to do with anything, but that is where the rest of this came from.

I was living in Ticino when the original of the slogan went to the polls, and my home today is a few minutes from the Italian border at Gaggiolo. In February 2014 Switzerland approved an initiative against mass immigration. What came out the other end, on 1 July 2018, was a duty to notify vacancies to the public job centres, giving registered jobseekers five working days' head start, and only in occupations where unemployment is above a threshold that has stood at 5 per cent since 2020. In 2024 those occupations accounted for 3.2 per cent of people in work. Ticino's own initiative, which was actually called Prima i nostri, ours first, passed on 25 September 2016 with 58 per cent, and the law meant to implement it was voted down by the cantonal parliament on 21 February 2018. Cross-border commuters from Italy numbered 64,885 at the end of 2017 and 74,199 in the autumn of 2021. For a couple of years now the figure has been slipping, for reasons that the unions put down to the new tax agreement with Italy.

Britain went another way, and I watch that one from Canary Wharf for about half of every month. Having ended free movement it found within the year that it was short of lorry drivers, and on 25 September 2021 the government announced 5,000 temporary visas for HGV drivers and 5,500 for poultry workers, valid until Christmas Eve. Care workers were brought into the sponsored route in 2022. Net migration reached 944,000 in the year to March 2023, the highest ever recorded, and only then did the tightening begin: the care route was closed to recruitment from overseas on 22 July 2025 and the 2024 figure, on the revised count, came down to 345,000.

In both countries the slogan won at the ballot box and then the demand for labour found a gap, which in Bern was a watered-down rule and in London a different channel. The next British move is the one that sits closest to Washington's. Between 20 November 2025 and 12 February 2026 the Home Office consulted, under the title A Fairer Pathway to Settlement, on doubling the standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from five years to ten, with fifteen floated for sponsored workers in jobs below degree level. It drew more than 200,000 responses. As I write none of it is in the Immigration Rules, the autumn start the Home Secretary spoke of in March appears to have slipped, and whether it will catch people who are already here is still undecided. It comes on top of stricter rules at entry, so the likeness is in the mechanism and not in the whole policy, but the mechanism is the same one. It lengthens the stretch during which a worker needs a sponsor behind every job, and it does so slowly and after a consultation where Washington did it at a press conference.

In Washington the gap is missing for now, unless as long as it needs to is the language of someone preparing a negotiation. I think it is. Vance said he wants to see these companies change the way they hire, which sounds more like a demand than a verdict. If a deal comes we shall have the Swiss ending on an American set.

Anyone running a business that depends on people who came from somewhere else can take a practical point from this. What keeps a person in a place is the settled status, so for as long as that status hangs on a channel that can be shut at a press conference, or stretched by five years in a statement of changes, the engineer in the fourth year of a visa does the sums without waiting for the outcome of any investigation. The offices in Vancouver are already there.