From H-1B to CEO: How Satya Nadella traveled the path the US just cut for Microsoft workers – GeekWire

Satya Nadella came to the United States from India in 1988 to study computer science. Over the next three decades, he moved from a temporary work visa to permanent residency to U.S. citizenship, and rose through the ranks at Microsoft to become only the third CEO in its history.

“I don’t think my story would be possible anywhere else,” Nadella wrote in his 2017 book, “Hit Refresh.” “I am proud today to consider myself an American citizen.”

On Thursday, President Trump personally presented the Microsoft CEO with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The award cited his “transformative leadership of a critical American technology company, leading to its rejuvenation for a new era of cloud computing.”

Nadella thanked Trump on X, writing that he was “honored to stand alongside so many giants of American innovation.” Other honorees were Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, who also received the Technology Medal; and Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su, who received the National Medal of Science.

Five of them were born abroad.

Hours earlier, the Trump administration suspended Microsoft from the federal program it uses to help foreign workers take the same path to permanent residency. Vice President JD Vance said the company abused the system by laying off American workers while hiring foreign workers, and called H-1B workers “foreign indentured servants.”

“Our message to Microsoft is that you are a great American company, but you have to hire great American workers,” Vance said at a White House news conference.

Two different programs: The suspension does not prevent Microsoft from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. These are temporary work visas, generally granted for three years at a time and generally limited to six years, with some exceptions. They are supervised by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Amazon is the largest user of H-1B visas. It received more than 19,000 approvals for H-1B petitions in fiscal year 2025, about three times Microsoft’s total, according to an analysis of USCIS data by the National Foundation for American Policy. Totals include renewals and extensions, so they do not represent individual workers.

The program that Microsoft lost access to arrives later in the process.

Known as PERM, it is administered by the Department of Labor and is usually the first step when a company sponsors an employee to stay in the United States permanently. The employer must advertise the position and show that no qualified and available U.S. worker can fill it. Most applications are for people already working in the United States on an H-1B visa.

Microsoft is the largest user of PERM. The Labor Department adjudicated 3,161 of its requests in the fiscal year ending September 2025, more than for any other employer in the country, according to a GeekWire analysis of agency data. Microsoft also dominated in the first nine months of fiscal 2026, with 1,683 requests decided through June.

Amazon and Google filed thousands of PERM applications in 2022 and early 2023, then were largely shut down. The Labor Department ruled on 39 requests from Amazon and its subsidiaries last fiscal year, including Whole Foods, Audible and Zappos, and three from Google.

The suspension could hit Microsoft employees already on H-1B visas hardest. Many are counting on the company to begin the permanent residency process in time to extend their visa beyond the usual six-year limit, and the Labor Department says it won’t process Microsoft’s pending applications either.

Some Microsoft employees on H-1B visas were surprised by the news and were unsure whether it would affect them, The Seattle Times reported. The newspaper notes that the White House has not provided any evidence of fraud on Microsoft’s part.

Microsoft’s response: In a statement Thursday, Microsoft pushed back against criticism of its hiring and said it looked forward to “providing the administration with additional information.” The statement focused on H-1B visas and did not specifically address the PERM suspension.

The company said about 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions filed last fiscal year sought to extend or change the status of people who already work at Microsoft. “It wasn’t about hiring new people,” he said.

The rest was for new hires already legally residing in the United States, a group equivalent to about 1% of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce. “These are not newcomers to our country,” the company said.

Microsoft also said it files H-1B petitions only for workers who meet “the rigorous standards for this visa category,” pays them “the same as any other employee performing comparable work” and offers salaries “among the highest of all H-1B filings.”

The vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans, the company said.

Nadella’s own path: Nadella’s path to citizenship was not a straight line, as he described in “Hit Refresh.” He was working at Microsoft when he married his wife, Anu, in India in December 1992. The following summer, her visa application to join him in the United States was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident.

Spouses of permanent residents have had to wait a long time, and Microsoft’s immigration lawyer told Nadella it could take five years or more to get her to the United States.

Nadella considered leaving Microsoft and returning to India. The lawyer then offered him a different approach: give up his permanent residency and revert to a temporary H-1B visa, which would allow his wife to join him immediately.

In June 1994, Nadella went to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, passing long lines of people hoping to obtain visas, and told an employee that he wanted to give up his permanent residency. The employee was stunned, Nadella wrote. The plan worked and Anu joined him in Seattle, where they started a family. Nadella eventually returned to permanent residency and later became a U.S. citizen.

But in the meantime, back in Redmond, Nadella became known on the Microsoft campus as the one who gave up his green card. Colleagues called him for advice. One of them, Kunal Bahl, later left Microsoft when his H-1B ran out before he was granted permanent residency. He returned to India and founded the e-commerce company Snapdeal.

“This is the perverse logic of this immigration law,” Nadella wrote.