An Open Letter from a Microsoft H1B PERM Desk to the Americans Who Cheered Dear Americans, You can stop clapping. We saw the press conference. Yesterday the Labor Department froze PERM for Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. No new filings. No pending filings. Your vice president stood up and said no company abused the system more than Microsoft. He cited about 6,000 American jobs cut last year against about 6,300 H-1B approvals and nearly 3,000 green cards. The company answered that 80 percent of those visas were extensions for people already inside. Read that again slowly. Already inside. That was the point. You should recognize the fact that Microsoft had no intention of allowing temporary labor to stay temporary so Americans would be considered. Let that sink in. You think this is a victory. It is just a delay. We did not lose the jobs. We just lost a form temporarily- 6 months max. The H-1B is still valid. The desk is still ours. The code is still ours. What you took was the stamp that turns a temporary seat into a permanent one for a brief time out. Annoying. Not fatal. Green cards were already backed up, what's another few months. And whose fault is the situation? Yours. You wanted a decent wage. You wanted a house, a school district, a weekend. We took the req at the number finance approved. When your people trained us and then landed on the layoff list, that was not cruelty- it was a different kind of competition... around wages. That was a market set by a trillion dollar company making massive profits off the country they refuse to hire from. A market you refused to clear. If an American graduate cannot beat a sponsored job on price, the American graduate is the problem. You need to suck it up and learn how to eat ramen, sleep several to a room, and fake your credentials if you expect to compete with us. That is why we are better than you. Enjoy the small steps. A fee. A frozen filing. A speech. None of it rewrites the org chart. The next election puts the other party back in the chair. They do not share your panic. They will open the cap, reopen PERM, and call it talent. The flood does not need a new law. It needs the old one enforced the old way. Infinity is not a metaphor. It is the backlog you just paused. Infinity H1B is one election away and all we need is for your disgust with the system to keep you home so we can finish the job at a pay you refuse to take. We will still be here in November, not a single H1B has to go home when this is all over. All of us will be employed. You can have the press release. We kept the job. A senior H1B engineer whose green card is now a pending file (Screwtape letter style)