On October 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor suspended Microsoft, Adobe and a roster of major IT services firms from the Permanent Labor Certification program — the process employers must complete before sponsoring foreign specialists for employment-based green cards.
According to reporting on the move, the department said it would neither accept nor process new applications from firms including Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Wipro, TCS and HCLTech, alongside the two American software giants. PERM, as the program is known, is the Department of Labor’s gate in the green-card system: before a company can petition immigration authorities for a worker’s permanent residence, it must first prove to Labor that it tested the U.S. job market and found no qualified American applicant. Freeze a company’s access to that gate and you freeze its pipeline of specialists mid-stream — engineers already in the country on temporary visas, hired against projects that assume their status will eventually be regularised.
For technology companies that rely on global specialists, the suspension converts immigration compliance into an immediate staffing problem. Projects are staffed months ahead; specialists who cannot move from temporary status to permanent residence become retention risks, visa clocks start expiring, and rivals not on the list inherit a recruiting advantage. The IT services firms named are precisely the companies whose delivery models run on moving skilled staff between client sites, so for them the suspension touches the core of the business rather than its margins.
The fight over breadth
Employers are expected to challenge how broadly the suspension applies and whether existing cases can continue — the distinction between a pause on new filings and a freeze on pending ones is worth thousands of workers’ timelines and, potentially, their legal status. Suspensions of this kind usually arrive with a stated compliance rationale, and the administrative-law fight will turn on scope, notice and the department’s treatment of applications already in the queue. However it resolves, the signal to the sector is unmistakable: the employment-based immigration channel is being policed as industrial policy, and compliance departments just became a strategic function. GlobeNews9’s Business & Technology Desk will follow the companies’ responses and any court challenges as they are filed.
Related reading: Orkut Founder Wants to Bring the Social Network Back to Life · Oracle Slide Highlights Power Bottleneck Behind AI Data Centres · AI Marketplaces Gain Ground as Companies Try to Cut Token Costs
