US Vice President JD Vance gave a stern H-1B visa message, slamming companies for allegedly laying off American workers and continuing to hike overseas employees, only to be fact-checked by an Indian origin tech investor.
Lashing out at companies like Microsoft for laying off thousands of employees, Vance said he did not believe in the “bulls**t story” that they cannot find workers in America.
Speaking at a bipartisan event co-hosted by the Hill and Valley Forum, Donald Trump’s deputy questioned the logic for companies like Microsoft firing thousands and then applying for H1-B visas for workers, implying they are hiring overseas.
“You see some big tech companies where they’ll lay off 9,000 workers, and then they’ll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. And I sort of wonder; that doesn’t totally make sense to me,” Vance said.
The US V-P said that this pattern ‘worries me a bit’
“That displacement and that math worries me a bit. And what the president has said, he said very clearly: We want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies and so forth,” he said.
“But I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, ‘We can’t find workers here in America.’ That’s a bulls**t story,” Vance added.
JD Vance’s comments come days after it was reported that Satya Nadella-led Microsoft has fired 9,000 employees but applied for more than 6,000 H-1B visas since October.
Indian-origin investor fact checks JD Vance
JD Vance’s comments were immediately fact-checked by an Indian-origin tech investor, who said that the leader was “misleading people”.
In a post on X, the tech investor wrote, “Microsoft didn’t bring in new foreign workers after laying people off , they renewed visas for long-time employees who’ve been in the U.S. legally for many many years, stuck in green card backlogs.”
He said that companies are letting their long-time employees stay in the job that was earned by them.
“Saying that’s “replacing Americans” is like saying letting a loyal employee stay and renew his visa in the building is the same as hiring someone new off the street,” the tech investor wrote.
“It’s not. It’s just letting them stay in the job they already earned.”
He asked Vance to stop “weaponising lies”.
“And here’s what JD won’t say: many of the 9,000 laid off were H‑1Bs too. They got no severance, no safety net , just a 60-day countdown to leave the country. If you care about fairness, fix the backlog. Don’t weaponize lies.”