Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants
npr.org
npr.org
Any company that has successfully filed an employment green card (especially at that scale) is favoring immigrants over citizens by definition. The EB green card rules are highly outdated and a reform is long overdue.
They argued that a company should not be able to do that if they can hire a minimally qualified US candidate, AKA someone who checks the job requirements.
The equivalent would be banning the H1b holder from the US. The NCAA is the model to follow if you want to make something more exploitative, not less
It's no fun hearing about poor athletes struggling to eat at college but, at the very least, the Manziels and the Gurleys of the US are held to an identical standard and that counts for something.
The only efficiency they excel at is screwing over the players
The immigrant visa is usually a stepping stone to permanent residency via a green card though, and this lawsuit is absolutely related to that process - when applying for permanent residency (green card) on an H-1B, the employer must supposedly prove they couldn’t hire an American to do same job. This is usually called the “PERM process”.
There has always been a gray area as to what that standard means, I’ve seen different companies interpret it very differently. When we talk about employment based immigrant visas and Facebook, it is overwhelmingly the H-1B (the data on visas issued is public).
A green card (I-551) is indeed, not a visa, and I was speaking informally when I described it as such. It is a document that proves the holder is a permanent legal resident, which is an immigration status. The right to permanent legal residence is established through an immigrant visa, such as the EB visas for employment-based immigration.
If you are already in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, your employer will file an I-140 petition for (e.g.) an EB-1 visa. Once a visa is available (this is the long wait for Indian/Chinese applicants in many categories), you can then file a I-485 application for adjustment of status on the basis of the approved I-140 petition. Assuming the I-485 application is approved, then you will receive the I-551 "green card" as proof.
In short: yes, the story is exactly about employment-based immigrant visas.
The PERM process is specifically a prerequisite to an I-140 petition for immigrant visa. Anything assertion that Facebook was "defrauding the H-1B program" is completely spurious.
I suspect the qualifications are different depending on your citizenship.
What's in it for the company?
Bar is the same (of course, there will some bias from specific people, but those are one-offs). Even more - hiring H1Bs is harder than hiring a citizen and it's more costly to the company (immigration sucks). If they could, they wouldn't hire H1Bs.
Equation is different at sweatshops, where you don't hire specific people, that meet specific bars you have. They have no bars - they just need code/ops/qa monkeys. They apply for as many visas as you can, and get whoever they can get as a result. As long as they got enough people, they're happy.
H1B workers are often paid less that citizens. In the long run it is probably cheaper to hire H1B workers even after the legal costs.
At sweatshops. Not at FAANGs.
I think the tech industry in the US should be looking at American non-college graduates to do this kind of work, especially people from families without a history of college degrees. This would be easier than teaching people how to code and it would be a great foot in the door to the tech industry and a solid middle class career, even if they never become coders.
Even if you think this is good for purposes of equity or whatever, how far back do you go? My maternal grandfather was an attorney but neither of my parents went to college. Which group do I fit into?
Frankly, I think they are very bad, since they cannot be applied fairly and end up leading to more resentment and tension among social groups.
No adult should ever be judged by the "sins of their fathers" in any capacity. Family history should only be a consideration when it's medical history.
Fine. Let's just give preference to people who didn't have the privilege of having a college-educated adult as their legal guardian or personal responsible for their upbringing.
Does it make it better for you?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/accentu...
I honestly didn't read the article, Google can give you more info/data than I can. I vaguely recall HBR has had some good articles on it the last couple of years.
If you are truly curious and want to have a meaningful conversation I'm all for that. Otherwise there is plenty of material out there for you to google/research yourself.
First off, citation needed that discrimination based on national origin is widespread. It's illegal and you should blow the whistle if you have actual knowledge of such acts.
Second, "You're looking to hire X? My husband's friends's cousin is looking for an X role. Can I have her contact you?" => is a very common way of getting job interviews no matter what your nationality. If knowledge about the position is only propagated through personal and professional networks, the applicant pool will reflect that.
> such that certain orgs don't speak english at all
Sounds like bad management. If you believe in the free market, these businesses will fail. But I don't think they're breaking any laws, unless they discriminate against candidates that don't know this language (which is, again illegal, and you should report them).
and some of it may not even be explicit discrimination but self sorting. If i’m interviewing with multiple teams am i really going to join the one whose primary communication mechanism is in chinese/hindi and i’m the only american there? or choose the americanized team
Your continued life in a country shouldn't depend on a private company.
People think otherwise because they have a special (very lengthy) backlog for Indians, and to some extent Chinese. Until about 2018, if you were from another country, 3 years was longer than the average to convert H-1B to a Green Card. Lots of people would get it in less than 2 years.
PD: I just checked the numbers. I found this: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b.... Indians and Chinese make up to 90% of H-1B petitioners.
The Indian numbers are "inflated" as their backlog is high (i.e. they have to petition to renew their H-1B multiple times) - so for example if it takes 12 years for an Indian to get the GC, they petitioned 4-5 times and the "equivalent" percentage is really about a quarter of the figure shown. Whereas a South Korean likely will get the GC without petitioning a second time, so their numbers remain small.
Put another way, if the wait times for Indians was under 3 years, then about 75% or more of the people listed in the Indian count would have gotten their GC a while ago, and would not be counted.
When you adjust for this inflation, it's not obvious that India + China is > 50%. Nevertheless, I agree it is a significant percentage.
I'm still not really sure why there's such a strict limit on green cards per country of origin, when countries have such a wide variety of population or even area. What if India decided they wanted to make things easier for expatriates as well as increase their influence wherever number of countries count and break into the 28 states and 8 union territories.
Suddenly, they could get a 35 more votes at the UN and a ton more green cards. They could all be individual countries, under the banner of the Indian Union which sets fiscal policy and manages the currency and provide for common defense. There's plenty of space in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 namespace for 36 new entities, and there's lots of good reasons to do it!
The government said Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that it instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders.
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At the scale Facebook operates at and the number of employees they hire it makes a huge material advantage for them to hire cheaper foreigners for the same task. It is rational behavior. Foreigners are always cheaper for the same task at hand.
The fine they paid is a fraction of their cost savings over the years. Many companies in Silicon Valley deliberately target cheaper foreigners than Americans.
It is pure economics and FB has that built into their hiring model at scale.
The only way to eliminate foreigners undercutting American salaries is to eliminate the foreign labor supply competition.
That of course will not happen as all the big corporations promote all the alphabet soup of visas ranging from F1 to H1 to others.
STEM jobs are the ones foreigners can compete in and depress the salaries of Americans in SV. The jobs that are not at as much risk are the ones that require command of the culture and language and the lay of the land like enterprise sales and marketing functions.
The problem isn't foreign labor supply, its that the foreign nationals are forced to stick around at bad employers due to the way US immigration is tied to employment instead of credentials and skills.
Comparing US and Canada, A foreign national in Canada who graduates from a STEM degree, and obtains a job, gets to apply for Permanent residency which is not tied to an employer.
On the otherhand in the US the visa (H1B, L1, O1) are all tied to the employer, which means leaving a bad job is difficult to impossible without jeopardizing their legal status in the country.
So FB has all incentives for hiring foreign nationals who have no choice but to stick around at a company that treats them poorly / underpays them.
TL;DR the problem isn't the foreign national or the visas, its that the US immigration system ties visas to a single employer.
While this is true for the L1 and one other (I believe J1), I don't understand why people believes this to be true for H1Bs. It's simply false- H1Bs can transfer employers, it just takes a couple of weeks and some paperwork, and thousands do it every year. I know a number of folks professionally who've done it without hassle, and I know a couple people in my personal life who've also transferred.
There is a period when an employer has sponsored you for a Green Card that you probably can't switch, but after the EAD is issued you're free to transfer employers again. Basically, 'H1Bs are tied a single employer' is a widespread urban legend
https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h1b-visa-transfer/ https://thevisaproject.com/experience/us/h1b-transfer-premiu...
This is fine when you're talking about moving between large companies with the apparatus to do that, but it does mean that H-1B holders have fewer opportunities with smaller employers or those who simply aren't willing to go through the paperwork.
My understanding is that yes, this is technically true. However it's not a H1B holder telling the government "I'm taking this new job, FYI", as much as requesting that your transfer be approved. The risk that the transfer will not be, and you're stuck in limbo of returning to the position you just quit, does exist.
For people on these statuses, any required interaction with USCIS can be anxiety inducing.
While it may not technically be tied to a single employer, it's not fair to say that holders have the same flexibility to switch jobs as permanent residents/citizens.
In this case though the foreign workers are getting green cards that make it much easier for them to work somewhere else.
> The only way to eliminate foreigners undercutting American salaries is to eliminate the foreign labor supply competition.
Isn't this the 'lump of labor' fallacy? Immigration also creates demand in the countries immigrants move to. The evidence seems to be fairly clear that it doesn't depress wages on average: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red...
> STEM jobs are the ones foreigners can compete in and depress the salaries of Americans in SV. The jobs that are not at as much risk are the ones that require command of the culture and language and the lay of the land like enterprise sales and marketing functions.
Yet it's these same SV engineering jobs that have seen enormous wage increases over the past decade.
I do think there is potential for restrictive immigration schemes to depress wages by making it hard for people on those schemes to change jobs. That was certainly my experience on a cap-exempt academic H1B where I was ineligible to transfer to a commercial employer as cap-subject H1B employees are allowed to do.
The solution to that is to make sure such immigrants get green cards relatively quickly so they can't be exploited by employers.
For context, PERM certification is a required step in the green card application, where a company sponsoring a green card applicant must demonstrate that they posted a job ad for the candidate's position somewhere conspicuous for a sufficient amount of time and that they were not able to find a qualified American applicant.
Where this gets iffy is that because this is part of a green card sponsorship, this is always an advertisement for a position that is already filled by the H1-B holder, who typically has already been at working in that capacity for at least a year, and who literally is only engaging in this process because they intend to immigrate and become a US permanent resident.
There's literally zero incentive for any company to boot an already productive H1-B holder in favor of some random new hire just because of their nationality. Typically, the way this is justified is that the hypothetical new hire must demonstrate the ability to be as productive as the H1-B holder, including having context on the project. Otherwise, it would just cost the company time and money to fire the employed person and hire/onboard the new one for no benefit to the company whatsoever. It would indeed be doubly bad from a reputation perspective since then foreign talent would definitely avoid applying to a company that just boots people and leaves them out in the cold with an invalid residency status forcing them to move back to their home country in a month's window. The justification that companies can't find the talent in the country boils down to that: where were these so called qualified american candidates a year prior to the PERM application? IF they existed then, the company would certainly have preferred to hire them because H1-B/PERM/green card sponsorship actually costs quite a bit of money to the company.
Now, I may be biased, since I'm a green card holder myself, but the thing with PERM is that the H1-B engagement is a mutual investment which started at least a year prior to PERM coming into the picture in the first place (it's an investment by the company, in terms of finding and onboarding a new person and getting them to be productive, as well as by the employee, who works to build context and become necessary to the company). Is it "fair" that one person ought to have the right to just come in after the fact and enjoy the fruits of other people's investments just because of their nationality, especially considering that this entails a losing party who for all intents and purposes was already a productive member of American society working towards acquiring permanent residency status?
From my read looking at other articles on the matter (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/facebook-face-claim...), Facebook is accused of not circulating enough these job postings to and making it too easy for the non-American they already hired to keep their job. They’re not creating jobs that entire populations except the US can see.
I knew of a professor with a work visa who spoke out against a University policy of oversizing certain classes. They revoked or did not renew his visa (or however the termination of an employer-sponsored visa works), and mid-semester he had a nervous breakdown, was forced to short sell his house, and was forced to go back to his home country.
An H-1B only requires a Labor Condition Application (LCA) which is basically an agreement to pay the prevailing wage and an assertion that there's not an ongoing labor dispute (strike, lockout) ongoing at the proposed location of hire.
However, from what I understood, it only applies employers who have been designated H-1B dependent (something like 15% of their workforce is H-1B) or something like that, or were identified abusers of the program. And even then, there is a salary limit, i.e. if you are paying over $X (which I am assuming facebook is), even if you're workforce is a high enough proportion H-1B you would be dependent, you are still exempt.