Microsoft is laying off about 9,000 employees after applying to fill thousands of foreign worker positions in the months leading up to the mass layoffs, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data.
DOL quarterly statistics show that Microsoft submitted 4,776 labor condition applications, a prerequisite for filing H-1B visa petitions, between September and March, indicating to the U.S. government that it intends to fill 14,181 positions with foreign workers this fiscal year. The filings, however, include extensions to existing employment (3,680), petition amendments (285), and transfers (487), not just new H-1B hires, although the number of new foreign worker hires (9,738) was still high.
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But the volume of applications for foreign worker positions, coming in the months before Microsoft laid off thousands of employees to cut costs, has drawn scrutiny to the Seattle-based tech giant amid a broader national debate over the effects of immigration policy on American workers and wages.
“It’s explicitly legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers, and that didn’t happen by accident,” Immigration Reform Law Institute legal counsel John Miano told the Washington Examiner. “That was Congress’s deliberate action.”
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As of March 31, Microsoft ranks No. 3 nationwide with 14,181 foreign worker positions certified for fiscal 2025, almost enough to replace every employee laid off since May, according to the second quarter DOL report, if that number of foreign worker positions reflected the number of foreign workers Microsoft actually intended to bring to the U.S., which Microsoft disputed.
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Microsoft is now third in the nation by number of approved H-1B petitions. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ fiscal 2025 figures, to date, Microsoft has 2,862 H-1B beneficiaries approved by the federal immigration agency, slightly ahead of Meta at 2,843 and Google at 2,781.
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At a Meta conference in April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said up to 30% of the company’s code inside its repositories is written by artificial intelligence. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, speaking generally on the future of coding, said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030. “Very little is going to be human-written code,” Scott said in a March appearance on the 20-minute Venture Capitalist podcast.
Microsoft is expanding operations in India, including the establishment of new data centers. In January, Nadella announced a strategic partnership with the government of India as well as a $3 billion investment in India cloud and AI infrastructure. As part of its “commitment” to accelerating AI innovation in India, Microsoft is training 10 million Indians in AI skills.
“They brought in an Indian CEO, and he’s basically trying to make Microsoft into an Indian company,” Miano said of Nadella.
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