Microsoft rejects idea that company is replacing American workers with foreign labor after massive layoffs

Tech giant Microsoft has denied media reports that it has replaced American workers with those from other countries through visa programs.

It has been just two months since Microsoft cut 7,000 employees, or roughly 3% of its workforce, in May, including almost 2,000 in Washington state. Last week, Microsoft wasted little time before implementing another round of mass layoffs.

‘We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success.’

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced another round of cuts that affects 4% of the workforce, which totals around 9,000 employees losing their jobs, according to CNN.

A spokesperson from Microsoft told CNN that the cuts are simply a case of reducing managerial layers while becoming more productive through new technologies.

“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the statement claimed.

With the last formal count of Microsoft workers from 2024 standing at 228,000, some are speculating that the thousands upon thousands of layoffs — including 10,000 in 2023 — are made possibly by the use of artificial intelligence. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even said in April that as much as 30% of the company’s code has been written by AI.

This does not paint the whole picture, however, as figures from the Department of Labor suggest that Microsoft is relying heavily on foreign labor for large numbers of its workforce in the United States.

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  Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

As first noted by WorldNetDaily, statistics from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification showed that Microsoft has requested thousands of foreign workers through the temporary specialty occupations program.

In total, the company filed 14,181 Labor Condition Applications to sponsor foreign workers for temporary employment visas through initiatives like the H-1B program.

Also according to WorldNetDaily, the May layoffs, which included 817 software engineers, coincided with Microsoft submitting over 6,000 H-1B requests for software engineer roles that matched the same job titles and locations as those of the American employees who received their marching papers.

In a statement to Blaze News, however, Microsoft rejected the implication of these reports.

“It’s wrong to suggest our H-1B applications are in any way related to the recent job eliminations in part because employees on H-1Bs also lost their roles,” Microsoft’s David Cuddy explained. “This data far exceeds the actual H-1B petitions we filed the past 12 months, and 78% of those were extensions for existing employees and not new employees coming to the U.S.”

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  Image via Department of Labor

Blaze News asked the Department of Labor to explain the statistics and clarify whether the number in question included visa extensions, previously existing visas, and more. The federal department did not respond.

Blaze News also asked investor David L. Bahnsen of the Bahnsen Group about the DOL statistics, and he stated that the vast majority of foreign contributions to “high-end aspects” of the U.S. labor market “come in specialized sectors where the U.S. talent pool lags far behind Indian and Asian contributors (math and science).”

The investor also advocated for an increased number of H-1B visas from the federal government.

The Microsoft Corporation filed the third-most requests for H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 visas in the second quarter of 2025, according to the Labor Department. This placed the company behind NVIDIA, which requested a massive 27,244 foreign workers, while Amazon had even more at 31,817.

Cisco and Oracle were lower on the list, along with three divisions of Goldman Sachs and Amazon Web Services.

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