Just three months after Microsoft shot down a racist conspiracy theory claiming the company was laying off thousands of American workers so it could replace them with foreigners via the H-1B visa program, the Trump administration has suspended the company's ability to apply for green cards for workers on the H-1B program, accusing it of fraudulently using the program to replace American workers with foreigners.

There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft

"The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers," US vice president JD Vance said (via AP). "Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years—probably the last several decades.

"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft ... Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefitted from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants."

Calling H-1B visa holders "indentured servants" is certainly a choice, painting legal immigration as a form of human trafficking and the workers as victims, rather than specialists who've chosen to work in the United States.

Microsoft will still be able to hire non-American workers on a temporary basis via the H-1B program.

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