Article

2026-07-10 Economy

Fury erupts as US brand [MSFT] fires 1,600 employees after securing thousands of foreign worker visas

[FoxNews] FIFY Mike
A popular U.S.-based gaming brand owned by Microsoft is facing fury after mass employee layoffs occurred in the wake of the company being approved for thousands of foreign worker visas.

Microsoft announced that it will lay off 4,800 people total and 1,600 from the corporation's XBOX division, which makes and sells the dominant video game console.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been approved this year to hire from foreign countries 2,273 employer-sponsored, non-immigrant workers under what is known as the H-1B visa program, according to data from U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Furious online critics claim that American jobs are being unfairly handed to foreigners in an effort to cut labor costs but at the cost of leaving U.S. workers in the lurch.

"A great way to fix this is to throw anyone doing this in prison," said one user on X. "Fire Americans to replace with thousands of visa workers? Straight to jail, and assets seized. This story has been told countless times. Fire American staff and hire foreigners. Over and over."

"It is the fault of our Government [sic] for approving the H-1Bs," another social media user lamented. "Our Government [sic] has sold us out of jobs at home and those being moved to other countries."

Another user described the H-1B program as "industrial scale job theft from Americans."

Microsoft is the sixth-largest beneficiary of H-1B visas, a program that is overwhelmingly dominated by workers from India. The company has even more H-1B applications pending. Microsoft has employees worldwide, but most are in the United States.

"These decisions are based on business need, not visa status. H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S.," a Microsoft spokesperson told Fox News Digital when reached for comment on the lay offs.

"Every single employer is exploiting the H-1B visa program," said the Project for Immigration Reform.

A lawmaker even called for a complete end to the non-immigrant visa program.

"This is INSANE. LEGAL immigration is a major problem. These companies, especially big tech, are abusing these immigration programs to replace American workers with foreign workers," said Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va.

"No more. It’s long past time to end the H-1B scam."

XBOX CEO Asha Sharma cited the company's financial health for the layoffs.

"Our business today is not healthy," said a memo from Sharma, according to The Associated Press. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses."

Sharma added that her strategy is to "reset" XBOX.

Some online critics, however, claimed Sharma's Indian heritage played a role in firing the Americans, given the percentage of H-1B workers from India. Sharma was born in Wisconsin.

Vice President JD Vance announced on Tuesday a large-scale investigation into H-1B visa fraud.

"Today, I’m proud to announce that the federal Department of Labor has started dozens of subpoenas and investigations into foreign fraudsters who are trying to take advantage of the H-1B visa program," he said during a press conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"American jobs ought to go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters and the Department of Labor is fighting back against it."

Recently, President Donald Trump tried to limit employers' use of the H-1B program by imposing a $100,000 fee for companies seeking H-1B applications.

A federal judge struck down that order, reasoning that it amounted to a tax that only Congress has the ability to impose. # id) ?>

Posted by Skidmark 2026-07-10 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [3105 views ] Top

1 I can't get to the article as I refuse to jump through Fox's hoops.
But.
Microsoft is a vile pit of un-American-ness. Hate for Microsoft runs deep and wide. It should just die.

Posted by Whiskey Mike 2026-07-10 02:29|| 2026-07-10 02:29|| Front Page Top

2 1,600 from the corporation's XBOX division

Those are not going to be replaced. The fail studios which never turned a profit were eliminate to include the 14 layers of management that existed between coders and Xbox senior leaders.

Posted by Procopius2k 2026-07-10 08:47|| 2026-07-10 08:47|| Front Page Top

3 Download Fedora Workstation 44

I won't claim that Fedora Linux is perfect but it beats the crap out of Windows. Other flavors of Linux exist such as Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat. Any one of them beats the crap out of Windows.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2026-07-10 12:16|| 2026-07-10 12:16|| Front Page Top

4 I kinda eased my way into Linux. First I installed it on a USB thumb drive and booted my PC from that. Then I installed it on a bigger USB spinning disk and booted the PC from that. Finally, I installed a one terabyte solid state hard drive on my old PC that had been running Windows on the original spinning hard drive. When I installed Fedora Linux on the new solid state drive the results were amazing. That old PC that had been soooooooo sllllooooowwww was suddenly fast.

I could still boot into Windows 10 from the old spinning disk but as time passed I did so less and less frequently. With Linux I can still access all the files that I have on the old spinning disk. The PC is so old that I doubt if it could run Windows 11 so I would have eventually been forced to buy a new PC. I'm not that cheap. I could afford a new PC but why bother?

Fedora Linux came with word processor and spreadsheet applications that do everything Word and Excel do with the same file formats but without all the Microsoft bullshit. And it was free.

It is true that you can't get all the applications that you can get for Windows. When I couldn't get Turbo Tax for Linux, I downloaded the forms from irs.gov and worked my way through them by myself. I still get emails from Turbo Tax wondering why I don't spend money on their software anymore. It's easy for me because I'm retired, I have time and my taxes aren't complicated. I'd still use Turbo Tax if they had a Linux version but, until then, screw 'em.

The best part is that with Linux you can get behind the scenes, behind the graphical user interface, with the BASH shell. It has a command line that Windows users might think looks like DOS. But old time UNIX and Linux guys know that it's far more powerful. You have to take time to learn it to use it effectively. You have to be a nerd. I'm proud to be a nerd and I'm especially proud that I don't need Microsoft anymore.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2026-07-10 12:58|| 2026-07-10 12:58|| Front Page Top

5
Have played Linux off and on for years.
Started after giving up on BSD unix.
Have found Linux Mint pretty easy to install and run.
www.linuxmint.com

Posted by NN2N1 2026-07-10 19:34|| 2026-07-10 19:34|| Front Page Top

6 I continue to be an end user, despite having two siblings who are professors of computer programming, one general, one heading one of the big super computer programs. I moved from a PC laptop to an iPad in 2010 for ease of portability, and because all I do on the thing is wander the internet, read ebooks, and moderate Rantburg, so I don’t need anything more complex or expensive — also Mr. Wife wanted to keep my stuff separate from his for security reasons, which makes sense to me.

Mr. Wife uses reasonably powerful image processing software for his photography; he bought our first IBM PC in 2005, but is finally going to move to a Mac for his next computer for better image processing even though the Mac OS doesn’t excite him in general, because he is not interested in spending the time to master the programming side of things. Either system is good enough for his finance spreadsheets, which is the other thing he uses it for.

Microsoft has triggered fury for all sorts of reasons — has from the beginning. President Trump’s team is working on other ways to get the H1-B and other visas under control. Like the illegals issue, eventually the US Supreme Court will make a ruling on one of the attempts that puts the issue to bed for good.

Posted by trailing wife 2026-07-10 20:58|| 2026-07-10 20:58|| Front Page Top

7 I got sick and tired of MS lighting up every two minutes with info I don't care about on my HP laptop.

So, I nuked Windows, installing GhostBSD and I use it now for the HP laptop. It ain't perfect, but I don't get interrupted every two minutes

I still have Windows 11 for my wargaming, but I have been slowly moving to Linux for Arma 3

I first used Fedora Linux in 1999, when I moved my family's business to it

Posted by badanov 2026-07-10 21:49|| 2026-07-10 21:49|| Front Page Top

8 How many Indians are top executives at US companies, companies that have national security importance?

So MSFT either hires foreigners (probably for less pay) here in the US or just ships the jobs overseas. Net effect is American workers get the shaft. What happened with Trump's system of American political economy?

Posted by DooDahMan 2026-07-10 21:59|| 2026-07-10 21:59|| Front Page Top

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