Facebook Settles with U.S. Gov over Improperly Reserving Jobs for Immigrants
wsj.com
wsj.com
The lawsuit refers to the Permanent Labor Certification process - the process of certifying that a position cannot be filled by a US citizen. This is one of the first early steps of an employer sponsoring an employee for a Green Card (so called immigrant visas, not H1-B). In the overwhelming majority of cases this affects people already employed by the company often on non-immigrant visas (such as the H1-B) which it would like to retain. They have already gone through the much demonized H1 visa process.
Onto the process - the "newspaper" reference which some commenters have been hung up on is a DoL requirement. It's literally Facebook going by the book and filling all requirements. Where the lawsuit comes in is that Facebook only followed the DoL requirements and did not advertise positions how they would beyond that.
Additionally the article itself states
> When U.S. workers did apply, the suit said, Facebook hired them into different jobs, reserving the open position for the H-1B worker.
Is this discrimination? Yes. Is there a better pathway to retain foreign employees? Not currently. I'm not a fan of Facebook at all, but they do what they need to to keep talent in a competitive environment.
> Is this discrimination? Yes.
It's fairly common practice to hire for the expertise and fit for the position. How is this different in that regard?
I was at a company that abused it, and we were hiring DBAs whose entire job was to administer MS SQL server. There were plenty of people locally who could do this, but none who were willing to work 70 hours a week for the very average salary.
The US government wasn't even sharing any data on the visas publicly until the Trump administration forced them. Once the data was public, it was blatantly obvious as to why they hadn't shared the data before. Wipro, Cognizant, etc were hogging the H1Bs for labor arbitrage purposes, making it hard for people looking for actual rare talent to get anyone in country. I had a friend from Pune who was stuck waiting in India for 2 years (an amazingly talented ML engineer) due to us not being able to get him a visa while Wipro was stealing them all in the same region for their labor arbitrage business.
For what it's worth, as an ex-FB engineering manager, this isn't how Facebook works at all. 99% of software engineers are not hired into an "open position". Facebook hires all software engineers that pass the hiring process without regard to whether they are US citizens or not. Then, after starting work for Facebook, there is a trial period where software engineers figure out what team they are going to work for, usually working a bit on a few different teams.
Unfortunately, immigration law seems to be written by people who had no familiarity with how modern large software engineering companies operate. Tech companies are essentially forced to make up "positions" for the purposes of immigration law. This makes the law pointless, except for the occasional fine for not obeying the meaningless rules precisely enough, which is just the cost of doing business.
There is just no way to make a company "first consider US citizens for every open job" when you don't hire one person at a time for separate jobs. What does that even mean when you are trying to hire 100 people a week, and you just want to hire the 100 best people you can find every week? This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.
That if over 100 Americans apply, “the 100 best people” needs to come from that group — not immigrants on visas which require a lack of American applicants.
> This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.
I think you don’t like the goal.
This specific regulation was finalized in December 2004, so yes, it obviously could not have taken Facebook's specific hiring practices into consideration given Facebook hadn't even existed for a full year yet and I think had 6 employees at the time.
You can certainly argue the law needs to change, but man, good luck. There are a lot of other aspects of immigration law that need to change with higher priority than this, but it's a political minefield that candidates love to campaign on but Congress won't actually touch with a 50 foot pole. Until then, I don't think the Department of Labor has much choice but to enforce the law as it exists today. It isn't up to them to change it.
Not really sure with how requiring "modern large software engineering companies" to hire qualified US citizens before hiring foreigners is somehow a burden to said companies. How is it harder to skip the H-1B process than to hire one of the US citizens?
> Tech companies are essentially forced to make up "positions" for the purposes of immigration law.
If you don't have positions, why are you hiring? They aren't sitting around twiddling their thumbs just collecting a paycheck, are they? If you don't know where the H-1Bs are going to be, how do you know a US citizen is not qualified for the position the H-1B ends up in?
> There is just no way to make a company "first consider US citizens for every open job" when you don't hire one person at a time for separate jobs. What does that even mean when you are trying to hire 100 people a week, and you just want to hire the 100 best people you can find every week?
Um, you hire the best 100 US citizens and forget the H-1B process? Is it really that difficult? If you have a specific position which you can't seem to fill, train someone? Still can't fill it, then go through H-1B? How/why is hiring via H-1B the default? That is the baffling thing.
> This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.
Really? It seems pretty clear the intention is to force companies to hire US citizens when there is someone which can fill the position. When the position is "best people you can find", how can you argue a US citizen does not fulfill the requirements?
In the current environment, if you work in tech, and don't have a job at Facebook/FAANG, there is a reason. There are tons of possible reasons. An immigrant "taking your job" is definitely not that reason.
Because the 100 best people you can find aren't all US citizens, when their citizenship isn't relevant to the job. This law (and common sense) permits companies to hire for a highly paid job and to make the requirements so demanding that you have to look outside the US to hire enough people. That's exactly what is happening at the large "good" tech companies like Facebook or Google, and the same is true down to the mid size "good" tech companies like Airbnb or Stripe.
The real abusers of the immigration system are companies that are not bringing the best and brightest to the US, they are just trying to recruit immigrants so that they can offer lower wages.
However the problem here is that the government instead of keeping a track of the country’s labor needs, outsourced this responsibility to the companies and that’s where the problem lies. Think of this for a second. Imagine there’s 10k jobs for infrastructure engineering in the market, but only 9k US citizens filing those roles. The companies then fill those 1k jobs with foreigners. But to keep them beyond 6 years, they need to prove the foreigners that they have already on the payroll for years are irreplaceable and that proof for the government is in the form that no other candidate fits that criteria, which is ridiculous. The job market is always transient and there are always people applying, but that doesn’t mean there are enough people and that’s the paradox.
As a result, companies to keep people beyond 6 years, instead try to make sure they advertise the position as less as possible to quickly establish that they can keep their talent. A lot of this talent costs more money to the company than us citizens because of the additional hassle of immigration (mind you this is different from H1B and this is not visa specific). Truly speaking it’s less of companies abusing the system and more of companies trying to work with a broken system.
believe it or not companies would actually hire junior staff and train them up on the job and promote from within. let 's get back to that.
Lastly, I think we'd all agree that a graduate with the same degree can have varied performance and there's no guarantee that some sponsored person will come back with the degree and the skills they clearly need ASAP.
If your business was to collapse in 6 years why would you not spend that time finding a solution.
However, things move and move fast. And it’s not like companies don’t try to find solutions, they do, but they balance them with their need to stay competitive in the market. That is why you see initiatives all around.
On a separate note America's real competitive advantage is size. America can clone tiktok if need be.
What makes tech special, compared to other high-paying sectors, is that there is almost no barrier to entry. You don't need to spend 10 years in medical school or to pass a bar exam: many tech professionals are self-taught and getting an entry level job takes 2 months of training to a person with the right aptitudes. If somebody is not in tech, it's not because I'm sponsoring a dude from Moldova, which is a pain and I'd really really prefer to hire a local, but more likely because either they don't like to work in tech or they don't have the cognitive ability to pursue a career in tech. Then there's the occasional guy with the right aptitudes and interests who couldn't start a career in tech because they were somehow unlucky, but we are talking about a miniscule fraction of the population that wouldn't be enough to make any difference, we don't have hundreds of thousands of very smart people on the dole because Moldovans stole their tech jobs.
This is why we have been making fun of those saying coal miners should learn to code.
On job training regimes, universities and bootcamps don't do a great job at training developers, and almost everybody spends their first 2-3 years effectively in an informal on-the-job training regime.
The faculties for software engineering are not quite so rare, but I would argue there's a similar dynamic going on.
However, if you look closely, even that pipeline is kind of skewed. Very few Americans pursue advanced degrees, and even when they do, they concentrate towards business or some other non stem course. My Phd cohort consisted of 12 people out of which 7 were non citizens.
If H1B was restricted to advanced degrees such as PhD's I doubt many people would complain. It would certainly be more in line with the intent of the program. Why more Americans don't pursue STEM PhD's is an excellent question. Do you have any insight on that?
Plus, getting college degrees is expensive. People who have a STEM degree only feel a need for advanced degree if their careers aren’t doing that well. Why would you give up a high paying job to go into debt? If things are doing great, why change anything?
And last but not the least, market dynamics. If you spend 5 years to get a PHD + 2 years of Master’s, you get a higher paying job than a fresh undergrad, but people with 7 yoe get paid a lot more than that because they develop a different set of skills by then. It isn’t a very lucrative proposition for most Americans.
I would imagine this is a symptom of immigration abuse more than a rationale for more of these visas, as if often touted.
Besides tech, US universities are probably the biggest abuser of the foreign worker / visa pipeline. Not only for workers themselves, but the educational system itself now caters to inflated tuition paying foreigners who know they'll be awarded, on top of their degree, an OPT or similar visa that will allow them to chain it to another longer term method like Perm residence, marriage, H1B, etc - such that they'll be here for decades with the ability to remain and work and (push down wages for citizens), even though the original deal was they were coming here to study for 2 years and then go back home.
If you were a smart 20 year old American deciding on your major, and you noticed that 90% of the tech classes were foreigners, what would you do? And furthermore, the graduate tech programs didn't even seem to want you, because they knew they could get a foreigner to pay 2x as much tuition and / or work twice as hard, because the gov't was allowing the college to essentially "sell" a work visa along with the diploma to the foreign students.
If I were advising some bright 20 year old, I'd tell them to run from academia and tech as fast as they can - use their smarts in law or medicine where you'll make 2x as much with 2x the respect, and you won't be competing against millions of foreign workers in your own country.
The large tech companies are hiring thousands of software engineers each year and just want the best talent they can get. Maybe 75% of them hired to work in the US are US citizens. Sure, you can train new people, and they do train new people all the time. But you won't be able to get the same quality of software engineer if you restrict yourself to only US citizens - that's just common sense, adding more restrictions makes the recruiting job harder.
Now, the theory behind an H1-B is that you're supposed to be able to hire immigrants if they are bringing a valuable skill to the US. These immigrants are bringing a valuable skill to the US. It's just that the law imagines you have a single position to hire and doesn't make sense for situations like "we need to hire 5000 people with this skill set and there are only 4000 Americans that we could find with it".
What immigration laws should actually do is enforce that companies aren't underpaying immigrants compared to Americans. That will discourage companies that really only want immigrants so they can be cheap.
You could even add on a $10,000 fee per immigrant, paid by the company, to get the green card. That would make immigrants more expensive than US citizens, thus giving companies a financial incentize to hire Americans when possible. But for the large tech companies, who really are bringing exceptionally skilled people to the US, I think they would be happy to pay this fee instead of dealing with all risk and chaos in the current immigration system.
Large tech companies employ millions, they can't all be the best. Tech workers aren't special, they're fungible. The H1B program exists for temporary shortages but has been abused as an immigration program which it was never designed for.
I'm fine with a fee based program but make it $1M. $10k is peanuts. If they're as special as the companies claim then they'll be happy to pay it.
For those curious about how this works, the company has to show it tried and couldn't hire a US resident, but they don't have to try very hard... so the company posts a brief job opening in a local newspaper. When nobody responds, because it's the newspaper, tada! Proof there was no American-based talent capable of filling the job.
The other way companies do this: creating job ads that look impossible to fill by requiring 5 years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 2 years.
Surprised Facebook does this as they certainly have no issue paying domestic employees top dollar.
What do you mean H1 transfers?
You need to prove that there are no US citizens able to fill the role before you sponsor a H1 visa. You also need to do the same thing again (only much more detailed, including prevailing wage determination yada yada) before you can sponsor for permanent residency.
L1 (intra-company transfers) also require proving that there are no better candidates (in the US company) that can do the same job. Including specifying all the skills and how many people you employ in the US that have those skills.
> The other way companies do this: creating job ads that look impossible to fill by requiring 5 years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 2 years.
If this is true (it probably isn't) why haven't you notified the Department of Labor and USCIS? They will be very interested.
Pretty sure that's wrong; the requirement for an H1 is a LCA (Labor Condition Application) which is primarily a prevailing-wages thing along with some other labor condition items (e.g. there's not a strike ongoing at the location where you're trying to hire).
Only companies flagged as H1 dependent or 'willful violators' need to certify that they've attempted to hire locally.
Ok, maybe I'm wrong – I understand the initial process for L1B a bit better than H1B.
Blanket L1 app, there was an _absolutely enormous_ document stack with all sorts of things(for a blanket L1). Including all the skills, and how many people satisfied those skills in the US. Also information how the company would be able to afford the wages (Fortune 100).
How much of this was absolutely required and how much was the law firm anticipating requests I do not know. The information about skill availability in the US headquarters was absolutely mandatory though.
If both incoming and outgoing positions are in the same geography and have the same responsibilities (e.g. a software engineer moving between Bay Area companies), the positions are considered equivalent.
> prevailing wage determination
You need to do this for H1 positions as well. You also need to file an LCA to prove the occupation is a "specialty" occupation. The process is in general quite similar.
For most people coming from abroad, they're either being hired initially on an H-1B and then - usually after their time on that visa is up - their employer might sponsor them for the immigrant visa.
Others come via the intracompany transferee visa, the L-1. In certain categories, e.g. L-1A, for executives/managers, that visa allows an application for an immigrant visa without the LC process.
Been a recruiter. It's comical what companies list in order to hire the cheap H1 they wanted all along. Absolutely no way anybody has the experience they claim they want most of the time.
Not just a brief job opening and it is not just one. It has to be posted twice and there are further requirements, can't just be a footnote.
In addition, they have to post the job offers in a board visible in the company.
This is part of the PERM process, which is step 1 out of 3.
If you are complaining about the 'newspaper' thing, that's why immigration reform is needed. You can guess how old the regulations are.
EDIT: https://www.immi-usa.com/perm/perm-advertising-requirements/
I've seen a few job ads that are active from 11:59-12:00
I want smart, hard working, talented people coming to the US, myself.
We have more people in the US than in 1960, and far more programming jobs.
I should also note this isn't the 1960s when women were stay at home moms keeping the participation rate down. No, now it's just the nasty kind of unemployment where people are barely scraping by because single income with kids isn't middle class anymore.
Unemployment benefits are not paid for by you the taxpayer. They are paid by the employee during employment and by his former employer both during and after the employment period.
At least that's how it was in the three states where I've opened companies.
Arguing for protectionism for yourself while complaining about the cost of protectionism for the unemployed!!
Who would be the "welfare queen" in this case. Is it those people who would have been unemployed with/without immigrants? OR Is it those who would have been employed only because of the presence of immigrants?
As brexiteers have shown, be careful what you wish for.
Its a complex situation filled with lies of omission.
Nor is it a corporatocracy in the legal sense.
Personally I think we should be trying to get most of the worlds brightest to want to become citizens here. The issue is when companies have low skilled jobs that they want H1Bs using because they can pay them less and know they’ll stay around as they need to for their visa. That’s an abuse of the system.
Hard work is a skill in and of itself, that many of our ancestors who migrated here possessed - and not much else.
1. The population was low then, and the entire economic dynamic and need for immigrants was completely different than now. Laws change over time to reflect the current situation and should never remain static.
2. We already have existing ways for people to immigrate here legally outside of H1B that includes the low-skilled.
3. H1B was specifically designed for people who have skills that are difficult to grab from existing citizens, and is a requirement of the program.
4. This program has notoriously been abused as a way to pay less than the existing market of citizens would take for the job.
5. There are plenty of great people who should be here on an H1B (especially fresh grads), but are subject to a lottery that includes those who consultants have put in specifically to pay less. The abuse has displaced some who deserve it.
6. The premise of pre-reserving slots for H1B violates the entire spirit of the visa.
You don't know much about immigration in the US.
Canada and Australia have extremely generous immigration systems, but are backwaters for software development compared to the USA, and IT salaries are worse.
Additionally, there is no diversity or equality in the US H1B intake: Indians make up 75% of the intake, and 78% of them are male:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b...
The H1B visa could be hugely improved if the intake was limited to 10% max from any one country and max 49% male from any one country. The US Diversity Lottery has per-country intake limits already.
And it also perpetuates the "magic number" of visas, which is not based on anything rational or reasoned. It's just a number someone invented.
I've worked at and interviewed people at FAANGs for the past 5 years and the bar for hiring is the same.
In my particular office, upwards of 60% of the people working there were either H1B or contractors managed by Wipro. There were plenty of job listings that looked appropriate for new graduates / people with less than 5 years of experience but these were rarely filled by non-temp/non-contractor/non-H1B folks. HR never went out of their way to recruit local talent and did the bare minimum to "post" the job. I sensed they made the jobs hard to find, but also wrote the postings in such a way that being unable to find an American willing to do the work was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more Machiavellian managers realized they could overwork the H1B's because of how dependent they were on sponsorship.
How about we propose the following deal: I'll let your company do business in my country unfettered by extra rules and tariffs, if you let my company do business in yours on the same terms.
Now you're doing business in two whole countries instead of one. Is that a better or a worse deal than the one you were proposing before?
Just this once, my sympathies are with Facebook.
Not really.
The immigrant folks who get brought in on these visas are basically exploited for harder work on lower wages in comparison to locals. FAANG tech companies care about low labour cost, employees who won't complain and won't report shady stuff going on in the company. H1B visas are perfect for that.
Immigrants make up nearly 3/4 of silicon valley tech workforce:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
H1B visas essentially gives full power over an immigrant to the employer because these employers have rules that if you don't get promoted every 1-2 years, you get fired - which means H1B visa employees get deported back. So these immigrants end up working much harder for lower pay to not get deported. Meanwhile the companies get cheap labour while virtue signalling about diversity.
Companies want employees who will stick around for as long as needed. H1B usually cannot leave the company for a decade because of the conditions imposed on the visa. Companies will also have policies of allowing greencard sponsorship after few years of the applicant working with them. This keeps the immigrant stuck with that company for over a decade and the company can get away with very little payraises or benefits. The only options for that H1B is to either find another company which can sponsor them (almost impossible) or to leave the country.
This is also a reason why immigrants are hesitant to report work illegalities and thus the company prefer hiring them even more.
This is also why all the tech companies are against any politician who wants to cut their supply of H1B visas.
The tech companies claim it's about diversity but it's far from it. Here's proof that this isn't about "diversity" or caring about immigrants but more about exploitation:
76% of the h1b go to Indians and 10% goes to China. Does diversity only come from India and China? Source:
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/slideshows/h1b-visa-these-countri...
Also when you get immigrants from India and China on H1B visas, they are less likely to complain about work place illegalities. Us Indians and Asians are often quite timid plus don't want to stir shit which gets us deported.
Few ways to fix this:
1. Increase the minimum salary for H1B to be much higher.
2. Force employers to give yearly raises to the H1B.
3. Allow H1B to change employers.
4. Only allow students to come who once graduated, get treated the same as a citizen and their immigration status isn't inquired.
These will remove the incentives for employers to exploit immigrants.
These 2 videos explain it well:
But I will say that there is a huge gap between FAANG H1B, and Tata/Infosys/etc H1B abuse.
It being FAANG doesn't change that.
Your argument appears to be against the fact that additional extensions are possible after an an individual has filed for permanent residency, but the process is delayed (often by a completely inhumane amount of time).
So your problem isn't so much with the H1B visa, but with the fact that people can apply for permanent residency and then be held in limbo for the rest of their life?
If it wasn't for the absurd delay in processing permanent residency applications, H1B's would only last for 6 years; well within the span of "temporary".
FAANG tech companies pay their H1B holders the same as they do permanent residents / citizens.
This settlement is about Facebook facilitating the process for H1B holders working there to acquire green cards (i.e. "set them free"), the exact opposite of what you would do if you wanted to keep employees who won't complain as long as possible.
People generally think these companies get punished too much in other threads.
Edit, source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...
(It might generally be true, but it is provably not always true.)
what makes one an "eligible victim"?
Does America not have schools or would Facebook rather just underpay foreigners? 14$ million is peanuts compared to the scope of H1B fraud.
For the WITCH companies, it's likely undercutting American talent.
Which is why the lawsuit is so ridiculous, why not go after the real perpetrators of H1B problems, consulting companies. Cognizant for example, known abuser of the system to bring in low cost exploitable talent. There's so much shady going on in the system but FB is probably one of the better actors.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-doj-lawsuit-unfair-...
If the position is for a company that specializes in French designs, I think it's likely that a French art director might have a better understanding of the domain than an American does.
I like how Hollywood gets a free pass on this. I wonder how it would look with American-only actors.
It certainly doesn't figure into hiring decisions or compensation.
In my experience it takes WAY longer than that, just on processing times. As in, I've never even heard of anyone getting permanent residency that quickly, at least for employment-based. If you are talking about marriage or family-based, sure.
Any audits or RFEs during the process and you are looking easily at twice the time you quoted. Probably even more - given the recent delays in the H4 extension process, which causes your own application to have to wait until your dependents can join you.
accused the social-media company of illegally reserving lucrative jobs for immigrant workers it was sponsoring for permanent residence instead of searching for and considering available U.S. workers.
Which is largely overblown for political gain.
Some companies abuse/have abused the program - mostly large consultancies. Focus on that.
H1 is a US superpower. Companies can pick brains among the entire planet(many of those brains WANT to be picked). At essentially no cost to the country.
Yes, each one will 'take' a job, but how many jobs are created by immigrants? The yearly cap is 65k. One Elon Musk generates more than that.
> underpay
Check the article, it is talking about "lucrative" jobs.
> Does America not have schools
Are you talking about the ridiculously expensive universities(and higher education in general)? Maybe fix that?
Interesting question that. I think the issue is that corporations realized training employees was a cost center and decided to outsource as much of it as possible to, as you said, ridiculously expensive universities. Of course no general education could ever be perfectly aligned with the individual needs of millions of unique positions at different corporations. The fix here is for companies to reopen their own training pipelines.
As a university professor, hoo boy is that a bad bet. I have a lot of goals in the classroom, but training future employees is not one of them; and, despite the corporatist mindset of my (and I suspect most) university's administration, there is no guidance from the university that that should be a goal.
What about citizens who are otherwise passed up for a career? I've worked with plenty of H1B's and none particularly stood out as "top minds" that were uniquely capable of doing the office work. While I have no doubt that the US is able to poach some seriously intelligent folks, I have a deep cynicism that corporations use H1B's to hire cheaply and bypass the obligations that come with hiring a citizen.
Yeah, somebody has to drive their taxis, clean their clothes, sweep their floors and serve their coffee.