Microsoft's latest round of layoffs cut roughly 4,800 jobs. In the same breath that immigration lawyers describe these cuts, they describe a company continuing to sponsor H-1B visas for other roles — and the legal analysis of whether that's a problem comes down to a standard with a lot of wiggle room. As David Adams of the law firm Cozen O'Connor put it: "Workforce reductions are rarely uniform across an organization." Companies eliminate positions in legacy areas like sales and operations while expanding hiring in growth sectors like AI, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity. On its face, that's a defensible business explanation. It's also exactly the explanation that makes visa-fueled displacement nearly impossible to prove.
The legal test, per Adams, hinges on whether eliminated roles and newly sponsored positions represent "substantially similar work" — examined through job titles, salary levels, occupational classifications, and geographic patterns. That's a reasonable-sounding framework for a courtroom. It's a terrible framework for an American worker trying to understand, in plain terms, whether their job was eliminated so a similar role could be filled more cheaply through the visa pipeline. A company doesn't need to literally replace "Software Engineer, Level 62" with an H-1B hire in the identical title and location to achieve the same practical outcome — it just needs enough of a reshuffle to blur the comparison.
This is the structural problem with relying on legal compliance as the measure of fairness here. Compliance asks whether a company crossed a specific, narrowly defined line. It doesn't ask whether the aggregate effect — American layoffs in legacy roles, continued visa sponsorship in growth roles — produces the same wage and job-access pressure on American workers that outright replacement would. Adams' framing, that companies are "reshaping talent priorities rather than replacing dismissed workers," treats those two things as mutually exclusive. They aren't. A company can be doing both at once and still pass every technical test in the book.
None of this requires assuming bad faith from every executive making these calls. AI, cloud, and cybersecurity genuinely are where the growth is, and legacy sales and ops roles genuinely are shrinking industry-wide. But "genuinely shrinking" and "convenient cover story" aren't mutually exclusive either. When a company can lay off thousands of Americans in one division while its H-1B sponsorship numbers hold steady or grow in another, the burden of proof landing entirely on outside observers — rather than on the company to show its hiring patterns track genuine skill scarcity rather than cost — is a choice, not a law of nature.
The workers who lost their jobs in this round of cuts don't get access to the "substantially similar work" analysis. They get a severance package and a job market where the answer to "was I replaced by a visa hire" is functionally unknowable from the outside, buried in HR classifications and legal memos designed to survive exactly this kind of scrutiny.
Read the original reporting: Cozen O'Connor on Microsoft layoffs and the H-1B loophole.
Hero image: Building 92, Microsoft Redmond Campus. Photo by Jiaqian AirplaneFan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.