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Comment by unishark | Hacker News Reader

> That being said it feels like a slightly out-of-place comment when much of this allegation is about hiring for jobs as part of the PERM process. If Facebook is purposely going through the PERM process with these employees, it is actively working to remove those un-equal terms. After the PERM process, the employee is free to leave and not remain with the company until they can adjust status.

I think they meant the special PERM "benefit" for employees is used as a carrot to attract temporary workers who may or may not ever get it themselves. You can't leave because you'd lose your advantaged insider status.

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I don't know what you mean but to add additional context, the PERM process takes ~1 year and the employee is free to leave before / during / after the process. It is not exceptionally hard as an employee on a H1 to have an employer sponsor PERM for you, most (90+%?) employers do it, so it's not an added draw towards Facebook if they do sponsor the PERM / GC.

If they leave after the PERM + I-140 have been approved, companies have a limited period of time to revoke the I-140 but this is extremely rare and won't happen unless the employee has really burned their bridges. Six months (afaik) after the I-140 has been approved, the company can no longer do anything about it, the employee can leave without any immigration related ramifications.

The wait for a greencard can be decades if you are from India and you are only allowed to work for H1B employers during that time. Even the wait for I-140 approval is unpredictable, because the USCIS doesn't have any need to approve it far ahead of your priority date becoming current - it can be years, and you can't change jobs in that period.

https://www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-immigrants-ad...

https://qz.com/india/1828970/over-200000-indians-could-die-w...

> Even the wait for I-140 approval is unpredictable

Yes, but you have the option of premium processing for I-140 and I think the benefits far outweigh the cost in this case.

IIRC the premium processing still isn't a guarantee.

If you pay it, and you don't get it within the 14 day period, you just get the premium processing fee back.

It's not a guarantee, it's just expedited processing. You get to know the decision in two weeks instead of an unknown wait time.

I didn't mean "it's not a guarantee to be accepted", I meant "you're not guaranteed to know the decision in two weeks".

You can pay for premium processing, and not get a decision within two weeks. In that case, you just get the premium processing fee back, and have an unknown wait time still.

I'm not sure how it is decided but sometimes premium processing isn't available.

Yeah, this is true, but there are also people on L1 visa which are tied to the company all the way until GC.

Also worth adding that interviews or hires from the PERM process would significantly add to length of the PERM process, if I remember correctly.

EY intentionally delays green card applications for some immigrant workers. This gets them an extra 3 years of labor from workers who won't complain about 70-hour weeks and won't ask for raises or promotions.

I may be misunderstanding, but if you are alleging that Facebook is "promising" foreign workers that it will go through the PERM process with them, and then reneging on that "promise" once they are hired in order to prevent them from quitting I have seen 0 evidence of that, not is that what is being alleged.

If you are saying that "not all H1-B workers go through the PERM process and get permanent residency", then yes, that's how it works, and is not at all unique to Facebook. And H1-B is not, and is not meant to be, a guaranteed path to a green card.

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