Tata says its workforce strategy won’t be affected by PERM suspensions and is hiring 15,000 more workers

Indian tech giant Tata Consultancy Services said the Trump administration’s new restrictions on employment-based green card filings will not affect its hiring plans in the US.

In a stock exchange filing on Friday, TCS said that it had submitted only a single-digit number of applications through the Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM, process over the past two years. The certification is usually the first required step for an employer seeking to sponsor a foreign worker for permanent US residency.

“Our workforce strategy in the US is anchored in hiring local talent, supported by a robust campus recruitment model,” the company wrote. “As we had announced earlier, we intend to hire an additional 15,000 people in the US over the next five years, to further augment our local workforce.”

TCS’s statement comes after the Trump administration said it was freezing PERM applications involving TCS, Microsoft, Adobe, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, Cognizant, and Capgemini. The move is part of the administration’s wider push to scrutinize companies’ use of skilled-worker immigration programs. The companies are among the largest users of PERM and other employment-based immigration pathways in the US.

On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance singled out Microsoft while announcing the action, accusing the company of laying off American workers and replacing them with lower-paid foreign labor.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.

Microsoft disputed that framing, saying most of its H-1B filings were for employees already working at the company.

“Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people,” the company wrote.

TCS is one of India’s largest tech consulting companies and one of the world’s biggest technology outsourcing firms. It helps clients across banking, retail, healthcare run cloud computing, cybersecurity and AI projects.

In a press release last March, TCS said its North American workforce exceeded 46,000 people across 32 locations, with major bases of operation in New York, New Jersey, and Cincinnati. The company reported having 598,056 employees globally at the end of September.