On Thursday, eight technology companies — TCS, HCL, Infosys, Wipro, and four others — lost access to a labour certification pathway used to secure permanent residency for H-1B visa holders, after the administration determined that the programme placed domestic workers at a competitive disadvantage in the job market.
Data on US immigration drawn from official records show that the four Indian IT companies facing suspension have sharply pulled back on PERM labour certification filings since fiscal year 2024 — a process that ordinarily marks the opening move toward employment-based permanent residency.
Tata Consultancy Services, which logged 1,804 PERM approvals in fiscal year 2024, saw that figure fall to just two by 2026 — a drop of nearly 99.8 percent across those two years. Data from PermTrack shows that the two approvals TCS had logged by 30 June 2026 each traced back to applications filed during 2024.
Two figures aligned in that period: the tally of approved green cards, which the company had already described to reporters on Thursday as having been drawn back from international hires, and a separate announcement committing to 15,000 new jobs spread across the United States over the five years that followed, extending a workforce the company had been building domestically. TCS noted in a statement that its PERM filings had remained in single digits across the preceding two years, leaving the programme's suspension with little bearing on either its workforce planning or its client-facing operations.
Wipro, which logged 506 PERM approvals across fiscal year 2025, has yet to record a single such approval in 2026. Approvals under that process were not granted until April 2025, by which point the underlying applications had been waiting since 2023.
During FY 2025 and FY 2026, no visa applications from Infosys were cleared for approval, with the company's most recent batch of authorisations dating back to FY 2024, when 87 applications were processed successfully. Approval tallies for HCL America Inc. and HCL America Solutions fell to 66 in the period ending 30 June 2026, a fraction of the 350 granted throughout the whole of FY 2025.
On Thursday, Cognizant — a company with roots in India dating to 1994 that now operates from a US base — had its access to the green card labour certification programme withdrawn as well. PERM approvals for Cognizant fell to zero across both FY 2025 and FY 2026, a stark reversal from the 1,235 granted in FY 2024.
NASSCOM, the Indian software industry body, noted the pattern while contending that tech firms were converting only a portion of their H-1B visa holders to permanent residency via the PERM process. It added that Indian technology companies had, over time, reduced their reliance on H-1B visas, broadened their hiring within the United States, and now count the majority of Fortune 500 companies among their clients, supporting those firms' growth and contributing to job creation domestically. The industry group's Thursday statement noted that workers holding H-1B visas who seek permanent residency through the PERM process make up a comparatively small share of those navigating that pathway.
Before sponsoring a foreign national for an employment-based green card, a company based in the United States is required to first work through the PERM labour certification procedure. Two steps govern the process: a prevailing wage for the position is established by the Department of Labour, after which the sponsoring employer is required to open domestic recruitment to any workers who might seek to fill that role. Where a search for eligible domestic workers yields no suitable candidates, the employer may submit a PERM certification request to the Department of Labour. Once that approval comes through, the company is positioned to file a green card petition on the overseas worker's behalf.
Immigration attorneys noted that technology companies with US operations had restructured aspects of their business models in anticipation of tightening visa and entry rules, with one observation holding that those preparations had been under way for a considerable period. Records show the company has taken on a substantial number of employees from the domestic workforce.
Employers who might otherwise pursue H-1B petitions and green card sponsorship tend to weigh those combined costs — which can reach six figures — against available alternatives before committing to the process. Hiring decisions at these firms are driven by workforce needs and business planning, not by arbitrary expenditure on labour from abroad, according to Ellen Freeman, an immigration attorney, who noted that the goal being pursued differed from what critics had attributed to it.
