In this thread there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding regarding both the Permanent/Temporary visa distinction, as well as what Facebook did.<p>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, <i>not</i> 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.<p>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 <i>only</i> followed the DoL requirements and did not advertise positions how they would beyond that.<p>Additionally the article itself states<p>> When U.S. workers did apply, the suit said, Facebook hired them into different jobs, reserving the open position for the H-1B worker.<p>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.
It’s a relic of a broken process. If you want to keep a foreign worker beyond 6 years, you can’t do that without applying for a greencard which in turn requires you to prove you don’t have a US citizen vying for the job, which should make sense.<p>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.<p>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.
An earlier article has a bit more description of the complaint: <a href="https://archive.md/67DiB" rel="nofollow">https://archive.md/67DiB</a><p>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 elephant in the room: make it too hard to employ talented foreigners, and sooner or later companies will just open up offices there, rather than here. Remote work has only made this easier.<p>I <i>want</i> smart, hard working, talented people coming to the US, myself.
This is a perfect case of good intentions on both sides creating hell. I've been sponsored in a country with similar requirements - every time you hire someone from abroad, you need to present evidence that you have tried really hard to hire someone local and failed. The levels of absurd there are likely the highest in the whole decade-long quest of my naturalization.<p>Just this once, my sympathies are with Facebook.
> Facebook will pay $4.75 million to the U.S. government and up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination<p>what makes one an "eligible victim"?
I’m surprised it isn’t all about money this, if you can find a job why shouldn’t you be able to live anywhere? Why shouldn’t it be up to the company to decide that the extra paperwork involved in bringing in a foreign national isn’t worth it?
>The tech industry broadly relies on H-1B visas to plug gaps in their technical workforce,<p>Does America not have schools or would Facebook rather just underpay foreigners? 14$ million is peanuts compared to the scope of H1B fraud.