Microsoft’s President Warns White House Against Skilled Immigration Crackdown

DUBLIN, Ireland — Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith delivered a broadside Wednesday against President Donald Trump’s push to block the path to permanent residency for highly-skilled immigrants, warning the White House that its plan could cripple the U.S. tech sector for over a generation.

In an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO, Microsoft’s informal No. 2 suggested it was ironic that the White House chose to target his company’s foreign workers on the same day it gave a medal to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a former H-1B skilled visa holder from India.

“We should consider the fact that when the president honored six Americans with these technology and science medals, five of the six had come to the United States as immigrants,” Smith told Decoded on the sidelines of the International AI Summit in Dublin, Ireland. “And those five individuals, if you put them and their companies together, have companies that have a market value equal to more than 25% of the market value of the total S&P 500.”

He continued, “Think about what those five individuals have done for the well-being, even the wealth and standard of living, of Americans across the country. Let’s not put that at risk.”

Smith sat down with Decoded less than one week after Vice President JD Vance announced the Trump administration would bar Microsoft and seven other companies from seeking green cards for its skilled foreign workers. Vance also accused Microsoft of fraud, claiming that the tech giant abuses the H-1B skilled worker visa program to avoid hiring Americans at more expensive salaries.

Smith emphasized his concerns about the impact the crackdown could have on the ability of the U.S. to attract top tech talent: “I think we should all be worried about sending — intentionally or inadvertently or otherwise — signals that send the most talented next wave of AI [or] SI software engineers to other countries, rather than the United States,” he said.

Going far further than his company’s statement last week, Smith rejected Vance’s visa fraud accusations and called the vice president’s claims “completely off base.” He also said someone “had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers,” noting that the “vast majority” of Microsoft’s green card applications were for long-time employees, not new hires. “Unfortunately, it’s just because the green card backlog is so long,” said Smith.

The Microsoft executive also denied that his company pays foreign-born workers less — “it doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker, everybody has the same compensation system.” And he complained that the more than 9,000 U.S.-born workers that Microsoft hired last year were “left out of the narrative” propagated by the White House.

“We will stand by our record,” said Smith. “And I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture.”

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked about Smith’s comments. Last week, a spokesperson for the vice president’s office did not respond to a request for comment on worries from tech lobbyists that a crackdown on highly-skilled immigrants would undermine U.S. tech competitiveness.

In a wide-ranging conversation that alternated between intense criticism and fulsome praise of the White House, Smith also highlighted Microsoft’s support for aggressive AI rules and a global safety regime.

“I would strongly applaud what they did," Smith said of the White House’s imposition this summer of export controls on Anthropic’s new AI models.

"What government in the world took the most decisive action in 2026 to pause product releases in order to ensure public safety?
It wasn't in Brussels, it was in Washington, D.C. It was the White House. It was the team that works for the president of the United States."

Pieter Haeck contributed to this report.

A version of this story first appeared in Decoded by POLITICO, the must-read briefing on the people, power moves, policy battles and market shifts defining what’s next in global technology. Sign up to subscribe to the newsletter and listen to the podcast.