Justice Dept files suit against Facebook for discriminating against U.S. workers

&gt; Not only do Facebook’s alleged practices discriminate against U.S. workers, they have adverse consequences on temporary visa holders by creating an employment relationship that is not on equal terms. An employer that engages in the practices alleged in the lawsuit against Facebook can expect more temporary visa holders to apply for positions and increased retention post-hire. Such temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility and thus are likely to remain with their company until they can adjust status, which for some can be decades.<p>I guess it&#x27;s good that the Justice Department is openly acknowledging that this is a problem. Maybe we&#x27;ll see if actually get addressed at some point now.<p>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 <i>actively working to remove those un-equal terms</i>. After the PERM process, the employee is free to leave and not remain with the company until they can adjust status.<p>Yes, the PERM advertising rules are stupid and outdated, but I don&#x27;t see any evidence here that Facebook didn&#x27;t follow them.<p>If the Justice Department wants to go after true abuse of the H1-B program, there are significantly-more-legitimate targets (Tata, Infosys, etc).<p>I honestly can&#x27;t believe that this has made me <i>defend Facebook</i>.

This whole area of law is nonsense. Facebook software engineering doesn’t have “positions”. You don’t apply for some specific role. They are hiring thousands of engineers every year, they hire for general software engineering skills, and you figure out what exactly you’re working on afterwards.<p>Meanwhile, US immigration law assumes that you are hiring one person at a time, and that each person is being hired for a separate “position”. You cannot say, we need 3000 people in this role this year, we have 1000, so we need 2000 more.<p>It ends up just being incoherent. You have to answer questions like “why are you unable to hire an American” and it’s like... well we <i>are</i>. We’re hiring many many Americans.

I am someone who went through (fully legal) immigration hell while building a company that in the end, employed 100s of US workers and had global competition (meaning, if we didn&#x27;t do it in the US the jobs would probably go to some other country).<p>Here&#x27;s my conclusion from this experience: if you are in a business that depends on Intellectual Property competes globally (i.e. not a nail salon hiring local workers), then in the area that gives you your competitve advantage YOU NEED TO HIRE THE BEST GLOBAL TALENT. Period.<p>If the immigration system doesn&#x27;t allow that, then either you&#x27;ll hire remote, or you&#x27;ll be beaten by an international competitor with more liberal skilled immigration rules. Neither is a great outcome.<p>There are simple ways to ensure H1-B is used to hire this type of talent. The recent rules that prioritize H1-B applicants based on their salary are positive IMO and address a lot of the Tata&#x2F;Infosys abuse (which is real). If you are truly going after the best global talent, that won&#x27;t be cheap!<p>H1-B is super old school. The notion is that you only hire someone in H1-B if there&#x27;s nobody that can do the job. However, the challenge today is not if you <i>can</i> do the job, but can you do it better than the global competitors? That concept is super foreign to immigration legislation (no pun intended :).<p>Short of a whole new immigration framework, increasing the number of H1-Bs and prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix - no lawsuits needed.

Seems like an open secret that tech cos like H1-Bs because they can pay them less and they’ll work hard because the alternative is getting fired and being kicked out of the country.<p>It’s a really backwards system with messed up incentives that probably needs to be reformed.

I think what people are missing here is that this lawsuit is not about hiring foreign workers over US workers, it&#x27;s about circumventing the PERM process. The PERM process is a bit outdated and requires you to advertise for the same position that a person is already hired for and has been working in, to prove that there isn&#x27;t another person who can take up the job. It is a flawed process because even though the process is to prove that the person is filling gaps in the labor market, it doesn&#x27;t fully capture that. Say you have 10000 infrastructure engineers in the market that are US citizens and there are 15000 job openings, if you advertise a job opening, you&#x27;ll always have candidates who are basically switching jobs and therefore according to the PERM requirements, you can&#x27;t hire foreign workers. But in reality you still need to fill 5000 jobs. So to compensate for that a lot of companies, follow the process which requires you put a job posting in print media and collect applications via mail, but don&#x27;t go the extra mile to post online. Because they already have the candidate working in their company, and they need to prove that they are worthy of the job. FB isn&#x27;t to blame here tbh, it&#x27;s the immigration laws that were drafted decades ago. I bet FB walks free of this one.

Based on what I&#x27;m reading, and what I&#x27;ve experienced, I would say a lot of Bay Area companies &quot;[create] a hiring system in which it [denies] qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that [the company] instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders [the company] wanted to sponsor for green cards&quot;.<p>In some cases, these companies don&#x27;t want to sponsor the employee for a green-card, but simply are satisfied with the work being done by the visa-holder, and want to continue to pay for that work. The companies don&#x27;t want to have to look for qualified local talent every-time the visa renewal comes up.

&gt;Such temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility and thus are likely to remain with their company until they can adjust status, which for some can be decades.<p>They need to fix that and address the root issue rather than force tens of thousands of companies to fire ppl who were working for several years and have a lot of institutional knowlege.

Interesting, a Justice Department lawsuit that specifically targets me! (This hopefully won&#x27;t happen again very soon.)<p>I work for Facebook in the US on an L-1 visa. I&#x27;m currently in the process of applying for permanent residence (green card) through the PERM process targeted here.<p>The Justice Dept seems upset that Facebook doesn&#x27;t advertise my job on the careers website. The reason is very simple: FB doesn&#x27;t want to hire someone else for this job. They&#x27;re doing the PERM process because they want to keep me.<p>I know I&#x27;m not underpaid compared to my peers. I&#x27;m fairly high level and came to FB through an acquisition. I have deep knowledge and ownership of a very specific piece of the tech stack.<p>It seems bizarre for the Justice Dept to argue that FB should just throw away their investment in me and hire an American instead. How would that help the USA?

Immigrants considering software unions, look about this thread. You see what people are saying. You can see what they think about you. This is normal. This is how they feel about you.<p>The unions are weak now and full of bleeding hearts who probably <i>do</i> care. But when they cover a representative fraction of software engineers, this is what it will look like. You will stand at a union all-hands and you will look around you and it will look like this, having reverted to the mean.<p>If you subsume your individual self into the whole, you are then subject to where the whole goes. Read this thread. This is where the whole goes. Semper Vigilo.

H1B&#x27;s should be reserved for subject matter experts, innovators, field experts - as opposed to every shmuck with a masters or bs degree in CS or engineering.<p>All those consulting firms like Tata Consulting Services are gaming the H1B process, middle manning the employees, and in result Facebook, Home Depot, and others hire them for 1&#x2F;3 or 1&#x2F;2 less.

I&#x27;m not surprised by this at all.<p>I used to work in the US at at a large international bank with headquarters overseas that preferred having employees from the same country as HQ. We would advertise a position, internally or just to alumni networks of unis there. Once we interviewed people and knew who we wanted to hire, there would be a delay because HR would have to advertise the position publicly for at least a week (or two, I forgot), and then we could proceed officially with the hire.

A lot of companies advertise through newspaper to comply with PERM so they can file a green card application. pretty much an open secret. DOJ is finally looking into this now.

The divide between US citizen W2 employees and everyone else will define our generation.

&gt; The complaint also alleges that Facebook sought to channel jobs to temporary visa holders at the expense of U.S. workers by failing to advertise those vacancies on its careers website, requiring applicants to apply by physical mail only, and refusing to consider any U.S. workers who applied for those positions. In contrast, Facebook’s usual hiring process relies on recruitment methods designed to encourage applications by advertising positions on its careers website, accepting electronic applications, and not pre-selecting candidates to be hired based on a candidate’s immigration status, according to the lawsuit.<p>Important to note: the allegations, if true, probably only indirectly impacted you or me. In other words, we all failed our Facebook interviews the good ol fashion way - through incompetence - not unfairness.

It&#x27;s nice that this is getting some attention, but I hope it results in good policy!<p>Other stories I&#x27;ve bumped into:<p>Trump&#x27;s executive order - I guess this is now defunct: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;h1b_visa_change&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;h1b_visa_change&#x2F;</a><p>US Senate moves to abolish per-country visa caps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;fairness_for_high_skilled_immigrants_act_passes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;fairness_for_high_ski...</a>

The actions described by this seem to cross the line somewhat clearly. But I always wondered about my former employer, who included the normal postings and the postings for H1Bs in the same places, but it was kinda clear which was which. Same hiring manager for all postings no matter the team, and a much vaguer job description. Like a type of role and some technologies to be experienced with instead of “you will work on team A who makes product B.” Probably on the legal side of the line, but I never would have applied for one of the jobs that wasn’t “for” me, why apply for generic Sr SW position when another job you could tell what team it was and talk to people on it.

An easy way to solve this issue would be to just liberalize the whole immigration process: for e.g. software development, research and any technical field, make it equally easy to hire either Americans or foreigners (whichever person is best for the role) on the basis of competence only. That would make the process more fair both to Americans and non-nationals and would ensure the best person for the job gets retained, rather than either the one lucky enough to be born on one side of an imaginary line, or the foreigner who might be hired simply because cheaper&#x2F;harder to leave company.

I wonder if we tried investing in public education at K-12 level, we might get more capable local workers? Unfortunately, certain political interests find more votes among the under-educated.

Seems like very low hanging fruit compared to anti-trust. A nice perk of being government funded through in-q-tel.<p>They will settle and write a small check while admitting no wrongdoing.

So many questions. Is there incentive to hire a citizen over an H1-B resident? It seems like an H1-B is an advantage to a company in every way.<p>Will the Biden administration drop the lawsuit after the transition?<p>Will this lawsuit be considered when Facebook applies for more H1-B visas on behalf of immigrants?

I&#x27;m quite afraid the timing of this filing will allow Dems to kill this off when Biden takes office without taking any political damage due solely to the association with the current administration. As someone who leans Dem that would be quite tragic.

Not surprised