Microsoft Decries Trump-Vance Crackdown on High-Tech Visas

Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, warns that the Trump administration’s crackdown on skilled immigration threatens the domestic high-technology sector and the “well-being, even the wealth and standard of living, of Americans.” Whether true or not, the comments spotlight a debate roiling the GOP. There is a need for strict border control, as President Trump has achieved. Yet our growing labor force needs, too, more legal migration to thrive.Mr. Smith’s comments follow the announcement last week by Vice President Vance that Microsoft would be barred from a green card program that recruits foreign employees. “You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” is how Mr. Vance framed the suspension of Microsoft from the use of so-called H-1B visas to recruit from abroad high-tech staffers. Mr. Vance wants Microsoft to hire more staffers born here in America.The vice president, too, joined by Attorney General Todd Blanche at a press conference, suggested that Microsoft could have been abusing the H-1B program in an effort to spare the company from paying native-born Americans higher salaries than their foreign-born counterparts. Mr. Vance’s high-profile announcement was likely best seen as an effort to prioritize immigration policy in the 2028 race for the White House. We’ve long been in the camp that supports the tightening of controls against illegal immigration, while also expanding legal admissions. These columns have stressed the need to issue “more visas for educated strivers who want to come to America to work in high-tech and other advanced industries.” These immigrants, like, say Elon Musk, “have helped put America in the van of the high-tech revolution,” we noted. Immigration represents what economists call human capital. This includes high-skilled individuals like those in the H-1B program. At the same time, we have stressed that “in a free economy it’s not only the educated who will contribute and prosper,” so unskilled legal immigrants should be welcome here, too. That said, it’s not hard to sympathize with Mr. Vance’s appraisal that Microsoft could be doing a better job boosting America’s pipeline of skilled employees.“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Mr. Vance said last week. That kind of rhetoric hardly seems designed to foster constructive debate on immigration policy. It suggests the risk for the GOP of taking a turn toward a kind of neo-Nativist policy that could backfire among the kinds of voters the party will need in 2028 to retain the White House.As Mr. Smith cautions, too, cutting off the spigot of skilled immigrant labor could impede domestic research and development efforts. He noted the discrepancy between Mr. Vance’s announcement on H-1B visas and the award, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, bestowed on the same day to Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella. The Microsoft executive, a native of India, was himself the recipient of an H-1B visa.Among the six leaders in the high-tech sector who last week received awards from Mr. Trump for achievements in science and innovation, five were immigrants. Mr. Smith said that “those five individuals,” including Mr. Nadella, “if you put them and their companies together, have companies that have a market value equal to more than 25 percent of the market value of the total S&P 500.” Does America really want to cut off the flow of such immigrants?

Microsoft Decries Trump-Vance Crackdown on High-Tech Visas

Microsoft Decries Trump-Vance Crackdown on High-Tech Visas

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