Victoria Slatton in Bloomberg Law: What the PERM Suspensions Should Teach Employers

Our founder, Victoria Slatton, has a new article in Bloomberg Law on the Labor Department's October 8 suspension of eight employers, Microsoft and Adobe among them, from the PERM labor certification program, and on the question that employers who sponsor workers have been asking since that morning, which is whether employment-based sponsorship has become too risky to run at all.

This post summarizes an article published elsewhere, and it is general information rather than legal advice.

The article, Suspended Tech Visa Program Offers a Warning on Hiring Records, was published by Bloomberg Law on October 28, 2026, and its answer to that question is no. PERM remains open to every other employer, H-1B filings were not affected, and approved immigrant petitions were not disturbed. No charges have been announced against the suspended companies and no written notice has been published, which is part of why the announcement has been read as broadly as it has.

What the piece argues should end is not the program but a habit that anyone who files these cases will recognize, which it calls two-track hiring. A company runs a real hiring process, in which managers decide what they need, post where they always post, interview the people their recruiters find, and hire whoever can do the work, and alongside it runs a second, immigration process, in which a job description is drafted around a particular employee's background, recruitment proceeds through the steps the regulations require, resumes arrive and are measured against requirements written with one person in mind, and the file closes. The two rarely speak to each other, and the second exists to produce a record rather than to find a candidate.

Nothing in the regulations contemplates two tracks. Labor certification asks an employer to test the labor market for the position it is actually offering, at the requirements the job actually carries, an employer may not impose requirements beyond what it normally requires for the occupation unless it can show business necessity, and the employer certifies that the stated requirements are the actual minimum requirements for the job. Those rules assume a single process, and they do not work when recruitment is a ceremony performed beside the hiring rather than as part of it.

The test the article offers employers takes about a minute to run. If the person you have in mind quit tomorrow, what would you do, where would you post the opening, would the language match what you filed, and who would you actually interview? Would you really decline a candidate with nine years of experience because the posting said ten, or one whose master's degree sits in an adjacent field, or one who is strong but lacks a single enumerated tool? Wherever those answers differ from your PERM recruitment, that difference is both your exposure and the clearest sign that the description was built backward from a resume rather than forward from a business need.

For in-house counsel the article sets out four practices that reinforce one another:

• Write the job description before anyone has a candidate in mind, and have the hiring manager confirm in writing that it describes the role rather than the person.
• Post where you would genuinely post, and treat applicants as applicants, because a recruitment that yields no qualified candidates in a labor market that plainly contains them invites the question of how the posting was drafted.
• Keep the file as though a careful reader will go through it, which means the reasoning behind each requirement, the resumes received, the reasons each candidate was not selected stated against the stated requirements, and dates that line up.
• Align the two processes, because when a company's real hiring standard is more flexible than its sponsorship paperwork suggests, the paperwork is the thing that is wrong.

The regulations have long allowed the Labor Department to suspend processing in connection with investigations, so the authority behind the October 8 announcement is not new even if its visibility is, and that is a reason to tighten process rather than to abandon sponsorship. Employers whose files reflect how they actually hire have little to fear from supervised recruitment, while employers whose files would not survive a careful reading have a problem that predates the announcement and will outlast it.

The full article is available at Bloomberg Law, and a list of Victoria's other writing and media appearances is on our press page. If you sponsor workers and you would like someone to read your recruitment files the way an auditor would, you are welcome to book a consultation.

Victoria Slatton, "Suspended Tech Visa Program Offers a Warning on Hiring Records," Bloomberg Law, October 28, 2026. Reproduced in part with permission. Copyright 2026 Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033) www.bloombergindustry.com.

Slatton & Hass Immigration Advocates is a Maryland-based immigration firm serving clients nationwide. This post is general information rather than legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. It describes a developing situation and reflects what was publicly reported as of October 29, 2026.