I'm not a Republican, but if this is accurate, it's something that these companies (or individuals in these companies) should be prosecuted for.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
Then why do they need visas then?
This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
They were committing fraud fraud fraud
We need clawbacks from the C-suite and disgorgement of illicit profits
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.
The same is true for almost all Europeans: living in the US would be considered a downgrade in quality of life so very few highly qualified workers are willing to move to the US when they can have a good life moving to the more productive Western countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria).
Souce? Because H1B was created specifically for them, post-USSR collapse, so that the US industry would absorb all the now unemployed skilled mathematicians, physicists, electrical engineers that were previously working in the Soviet defense industry, so that their skills now benefit the US private sector economy (SV) instead of some rogue element post-USSR collapse. And many, MANY, emigrated there in the last 35+ years, at least when emigration to the US was still easy.
Also, "cultural beacon" is such a vague BS theater-kid term that fits no argument. Knowing many of them personally, they more identify to the individualist capitalist "big house with lawn and big car" mindset of the Americans, than the socialist/communist "solidarity via let's tax the hard working high-earners and give to the lazy low-earners so we all live in concrete shoebox apartments" mindset of Europeans.
They come to western Europe instead of the US now, because western Europe is closer, cheaper, easier to get to thanks to open borders, and provides most welfare aids to refugees than US, not because the US is not a "cultural beacon" or whatever.
>while it's full of them (software engineers) in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, etc...
Bullshit. I live in Austria and it's not "full of them" (programmers I mean) because they earn less in Austria than back home. Maybe Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland because there's more US big-tech there with high earning potential, but definitely not Austria, which for me was the indicator that you don't know what you're talking about, and is making stuff up.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/microsoft-vis...
> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes
If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.
Yes, but what is the implication of the word "just"?
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.