The federal government has served subpoenas on nine research universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT, as part of what it calls an investigation into fraud in the J-1 exchange visitor visa program. Vice President JD Vance announced the probe at a White House press conference on October 8, saying the schools use J-1 visas to bring in foreign researchers and undercut the wages of American graduate students. Something weird is going on at these universities, he said.
The same event produced a second, larger action: the Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcing firms from the PERM labor certification program, the route most H-1B workers take to a green card. Both actions come from the administration’s Fraud Task Force, which Vance leads.
The Nine Schools and the Number Behind the Probe
The universities are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, MIT, Caltech, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State. Vance’s case against them is a single statistic: J-1 visa holders make up about 61 percent of researchers working on federally funded grants at the nine schools, against a national average of 38 percent. The administration has not released the data behind the figure or said how the nine were selected.
The investigation is being run by a new Labor Department unit the administration calls the Visa Fraud Strike Team. Anthony D’Esposito, the Labor Department’s inspector general, called it a historic investigation into J-1 visa fraud and said it would examine whether foreign influence, improper financial relationships or visa abuse are compromising federally funded research, with particular attention to China. He said investigations at all nine schools are underway.
The universities’ responses have been short. Stanford said it complies with all applicable visa laws and will cooperate. Yale said it would review the documents once it received them. According to federal data cited by Time, Harvard sponsored 2,218 new J-1 exchange visitors in 2024, Stanford 1,436, Yale 1,169 and MIT 1,087.
Why Universities Use J-1 and What Fraud Would Mean
The J-1 is not a work visa. It is an exchange visitor visa run by the State Department, created in 1961 to bring foreign scholars, students, physicians and trainees to the United States for a defined period, after which many must return home for two years before they can get a work visa or green card. Universities sponsor J-1 researchers and professors directly, under State Department rules, with no labor certification, no prevailing wage test and no annual cap. That makes it the standard way an American lab hires a postdoc from abroad: faster and cheaper than an H-1B, and the arrangement is temporary by design.
The fraud theory is that universities are using the exchange label to staff federally funded research with foreign workers they would otherwise have to sponsor on H-1Bs at market wages, or hire domestically. Whether that is fraud or simply the program working as Congress wrote it is the question the subpoenas will test. J-1 rules require that research or teaching be the purpose of the stay, but they do not set a wage floor the way H-1B rules do, which is the gap the administration’s wage-undercutting claim points at.
There is a precedent. In July 2025 the State Department opened an investigation into Harvard’s eligibility to sponsor J-1 visitors at all, two months after DHS tried to revoke the university’s certification to enroll any international students; a federal judge blocked that revocation. Losing J-1 sponsorship would end a university’s ability to host foreign postdocs and visiting faculty, which at the nine schools named would mean thousands of positions.
Microsoft, Adobe and Six IT Firms Cut Off From Green Card Sponsorship
The PERM program is where an employer proves to the Labor Department that it advertised a job to Americans and found no qualified taker before sponsoring a foreign worker for permanent residence. Suspending a company from PERM does not touch its existing H-1B employees’ visas, but it freezes their path to a green card, since a worker whose employer cannot file PERM cannot get a PERM-based green card through that employer.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling named the suspended companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. Vance’s charge against Microsoft, reported by the Associated Press, was that the company replaced each laid-off American with one and a half foreign indentured servants, his arithmetic from 6,000 layoffs against 6,300 H-1B approvals and nearly 3,000 green cards. He said the outsourcing firms have requested almost 3 million foreign workers since 2009.
Microsoft issued a statement saying the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and disputing the vice president’s description of its hiring. The six outsourcing firms are Indian-headquartered or employ large Indian workforces in the United States. The suspensions follow the $100,000 H-1B fee the administration imposed last year, which two courts have blocked, and the $103,265 version it is now pursuing by regulation, and they are aimed at named employers rather than at the program as a whole.
What This Means for J-1 Scholars and H-1B Workers
If you are a J-1 researcher or professor at one of the nine schools, nothing has changed in your status. A subpoena is a demand for documents from the university, not an action against any visitor, and no sponsorship has been revoked. What the university produces may include your file, since the strike team is looking at who is on federal grants and what they are paid. Keep your DS-2019, your pay records and your grant assignment together, and ask your international office in writing whether the investigation affects your program dates, your travel or any pending extension.
If you are on a J-1 anywhere else, the risk is indirect but real: a finding of fraud at one of the nine would give the administration a template to use against other sponsors. Scholars who are eligible to move to an H-1B or to a green card category that does not depend on the university, such as an EB-1 or a National Interest Waiver, should get that assessment now rather than wait for the investigation to conclude.
If you are on an H-1B at Microsoft, Adobe or one of the six outsourcing firms, your visa is intact but your green card clock may have stopped. Ask your employer whether a PERM application was already certified before the suspension, since a certified PERM can still support an I-140; whether the suspension affects pending applications; and how long it is expected to last. If your six-year H-1B limit is within two years, start looking at a transfer to an employer that can still file PERM, or at a self-petition category, because the administration has not said when, or whether, the suspensions will be lifted.
The site’s green card process guide explains PERM, the I-140 and the self-petition routes in detail.