JD Vance said at a CBS News town hall on October 17, 2026, that his “indentured servants” phrase criticized employers and the visa system, not H-1B workers as a group. He acknowledged that his wording had been imperfect.
The clarification followed the PERM suspensions announced after Vance’s October 8 remarks about Microsoft. At the town hall, he argued that an employer can hold too much power over someone whose right to remain in the United States depends on a job.
His first use of the phrase came as he announced the suspension of Microsoft’s participation in the Labor Department’s permanent labor-certification program. He said companies should not lay off American workers and replace them with foreign workers.
Eight employers face the Labor Department suspensions
The suspended companies are Microsoft, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini and Adobe. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the other seven suspensions. Five companies on the list are Indian IT firms; Microsoft, Capgemini and Adobe are the other three.
The PERM process is a Labor Department certification employers generally seek as the first step toward sponsoring a foreign worker for employment-based permanent residence. Vance described it as a route workers use to stay in the country after arriving on a work visa. India’s government later stressed that the certification process and the visa program are distinct.
Sonderling called the department’s move “historic action” against what he described as a “pipeline of systemic fraud.” He accused some universities and companies of operating as “visa mills,” and said foreign workers had lied about their qualifications to take jobs from American workers. He thanked President Donald Trump and Vance for “cutting off the head of the snake.”
Vance cited layoffs, visas and wage gaps to defend the action
At the Microsoft announcement, Vance said the company had laid off 6,000 American workers while benefiting from 6,300 work visas and almost 3,000 green cards. He said the figures meant the company had replaced each laid-off worker with “one and a half foreign indentured servants.”
He also asserted that a visa worker earned USD 20,000 less than an American citizen in the same position. Workers brought in by foreign outsourcing firms, he said, made USD 48,000 less than Americans in similar jobs. Vance argued that companies used the wage gap to cut costs while replacing American employees.
Sonderling offered a broader tally. Since 2009, he said, the companies had requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received over 2,30,000 visa approvals and obtained over 1,00,000 permanent labor certifications. He characterized those figures as representing hundreds of thousands of jobs taken from American workers.
India called the language offensive and defended worker mobility
India’s Ministry of External Affairs responded on October 9, calling Vance’s description unwarranted and saying Indian professionals contribute skills and innovation to the U.S. economy. The ministry said the terminology carried “painful historical and colonial legacy connotations” and was deeply offensive.
It also argued that the U.S. steps did not advance the shared ambitions of the two countries. The ministry said talent mobility benefits both economies: American companies gain access to skilled workers, while Indian professionals gain opportunities. It cited contributions to innovation, research, productivity and competitiveness.
Nasscom, India’s leading IT industry association, said the number of employees moving from a work visa to permanent residency through PERM was “relatively limited.” The association said Indian technology companies had reduced their reliance on the visa while expanding local hiring and building a U.S. workforce.
Vance said a worker's visa can give an employer too much power
At the town hall, Vance answered an Indian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen five years ago and voted for President Donald Trump. He said his remarks did not criticize visa holders, but the employers and rules that can leave workers dependent on a single company.
He explained that a sponsoring company certifies that it cannot find an alternative American labor applicant for the position. The worker’s visa, he said, can then become their “only lifeline to the United States of America.” If the employee challenges a supervisor or disagrees with a boss, Vance argued, losing the job could also mean being sent back to the worker’s country of origin.
He called that power imbalance a criticism of the system, not of every worker who holds the visa. He added, “What I said about certain Visa holders, certain H-1B (holders), is not (for) the entire category”.
Vance also referred to his wife, Usha Vance, whose parents immigrated from South India. He said he loved his mother-in-law and father-in-law and was proud of their daughter, who was born in the United States and is now the second lady. “My goal here is not to dehumanise any immigrant,” he said.
He illustrated his concern with a company that says it cannot find an accountant in its labor pool, then fires an accountant already on its payroll. “That’s not fairness,” he said, adding that the immigration system should welcome people who contribute while preventing employers from exploiting workers’ dependence on their jobs.
Mathur pointed to Amazon's early visa workforce
Shobhit Mathur, co-founder and vice chancellor of Rishihood University, wrote on X on October 9 that Amazon hired him while it was recording losses for 10 straight years. He said he worked in a rented building at “door desks in small cabins” and joined the initial team that built AWS.
Mathur said AWS now contributes more than 60% of Amazon’s profit and that the stock price has risen 300x. He also said Amazon’s buildings had changed downtown Seattle’s skyline, and that about a hundred visa holders were part of the company’s original team. Mathur invoked Jeff Bezos becoming the world’s richest man before writing, “Good luck building companies and wealth without these ‘indentured servants’”.
Another social-media user argued that the visa should be monitored case by case, while acknowledging misuse. The user said Elon Musk might never have come to the United States without the program.
