Infosys Says US Green-Card Pipeline Suspension Won't Hurt Business, Even as Workers Panic

Infosys said it expects no material impact from the U.S. suspension of the PERM program, the labor-certification process many employers use to sponsor foreign workers for green cards. The statement follows an October 8 move by Vice President JD Vance and the Labor Secretary that effectively paused the pipeline, a step that triggered what one report described as panic among Indian workers at U.S. tech firms who had been relying on PERM sponsorship to secure permanent residency. The gap between Infosys's muted corporate response and the anxiety reported among individual workers is the story here. For a company the size of Infosys, a frozen green-card queue may be a manageable administrative issue it can route around with alternative visa categories or offshore staffing shifts. For an individual engineer years into a PERM application, the same policy change can mean restarting a yearslong process or facing removal from the country. What's unresolved is how long the suspension lasts and whether it broadens beyond PERM to other employment-based visa categories, which would raise the stakes for IT services firms that depend on U.S.-based delivery staff.